No-one controlled the market. In 1973 the Arab vs Israeli war broke out. One of the consequences was that the Arabs put up the price of oil by 400%: the effect on the western economies was disastrous. In Britain the stock market was pushed over the edge to a catastrophic crash. It finally made the politicians realise they had no control over the economy. ibid.
The summer of 1976 was one of the hottest on record. Berkeley Square in Mayfair became infested by a plague of caterpillars. They got everywhere even inside the Clermont Club. One of the few Clermont members left in London that summer was James Goldsmith … Goldsmith was suing the satirical magazine Private Eye. Adam Curtis, The Mayfair Set III: Destroy the Technostructure
Goldsmith’s belief that he was powerful was a fantasy. The men who really had the power were the bankers. The men who really had the power were the bankers. They were using Goldsmith’s bullying nature as a weapon to break down the corporations. But the banks themselves were about to fall from grace. And Goldsmith would be left helpless and exposed. ibid.
The New York attorney [Giuliani] revealed that the takeover movement was riddled with corruption … ‘a substantial systemic problem in the financial community was revealed, and revealed in a way that moved us to try to make changes.’ ibid.
Boesky’s arrest came as a shattering blow of James Goldsmith … But the revelations of corruption started by Boesky kept growing. They now spread to Britain. As in America, the Guinness scandal exposed a network of illegal share-dealing, but unlike America, only four men were convicted. Evidence of a much wider system of corruption was quietly buried. ibid.
5,000 miles away in the Mexican jungle … He was Tiny Rowland and he too had been marginalised by the on-rush of the economy. Rowland believed that the Conservative Party had been corrupted by the boom. Both these men [Rowland and Goldsmith] wanted vengeance for their loss of power. And both now set out to destroy the Conservative Party. And they would be joined by a third vengeful tycoon who had been cast aside: Mohamed al-Fayed. Adam Curtis, The Mayfair Set IV: Twilight of the Dogs
Tiny Rowland was doing the same in Africa: he was taking over the old British-owned companies that had once dominated the empire. Rowland used ruthless methods to build a vast industrial empire; this included bribing the new rulers of independent Africa. They were methods that shocked the merchant banks in London. ibid.
The Conservatives’ boom had turned sour. It had led to inflation and industrial violence. And in November the Arab oil price rise pushed the market over the edge. It fell further than in the crash of 1929. The politicians now turned on the tycoons. When Rowland’s corrupt methods were revealed, Edward Heath publicly called him ‘the unacceptable face of capitalism’. And Goldsmith was now seen as a greedy spiv who had torn British industry apart to make himself a fortune. ibid.
The bankers not the politicians would change Britain. ibid.
Rowland knew that he had been stopped because of his corrupt past. He was furious because to him it was the height of hypocrisy. Rowland knew that underneath the new shiny enterprise culture there was a growing mass of corruption, corruption on a far grander scale than anything he had indulged in. ibid.
Fayed paid MPs to defend him in Parliament … The lobbyists found it easy to buy MPs, not just because politicians were greedy but because increasingly they were disillusioned. They knew that power had shifted from parliament to the City of London. ibid.
Currency markets decided to take on the British government. They deliberately set out to force John Major to devalue and to leave the Exchange Rate Mechanism. It was to be a defining battle over who now really controlled Britain’s economy – the markets or the government. ibid.
‘There’s a divorce between the interests of major corporations and of society,’ ibid. James Goldsmith, television interview
1997: The Labour government gave away its power and the markets rewarded them. Money did not flee from London as it had done when previous Labour governments had been elected, and the boom continued. ibid.
Although we feel we are free in reality we like the politicians have become the slaves of our own desires. We have forgotten that we can be more than that. That there are other sides to human nature. Adam Curtis, The Century of the Self, BBC 2002
In the past politicians promised to create a better world. They had different ways of achieving this but their power and authority came from the optimistic visions they offered their people. Those dreams failed and today people had lost faith in ideologies. Increasingly, politicians are seen increasingly as managers in public life … 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, a powerful and sinister network with sleeper cells in countries across the world, a threat that needs to be fought by a War on Terror. But much of this threat is a fantasy which has been exaggerated and distorted by politicians. Adam Curtis: The Power of Nightmares I: Baby It’s Cold Outside, BBC 2004
Those with the darkest fears became the most powerful. ibid.
What Qutb believed he was seeing was a hidden and dangerous reality underneath the surface of ordinary American life … American society was not going forwards, it was taking people backwards; they were becoming isolated beings. ibid.
[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.