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.
John le Carre: In a country whose power had collapsed, leaving only a drab decaying reality all around, the spies had managed to recreate a magical world where they could go anywhere they wanted, bug, burgle and even assassinate without any fear of judgment or control, just like in the empire. ibid.
Ever since the Second World War the American Government had been using the CIA to manipulate and overthrow the governments of many other countries … The dual state … had to be kept secret from the people … From the 1950s onwards the CIA rigged elections, destabilised governments through fake information, and organised violence coups in Italy, Greece, Syria, Iran, Guatemala, South Vietnam, Indonesia and Chile. In all, the United States ran covert operations to overthrow 66 foreign governments. In 26 cases they succeeded. ibid.
In 1961 the CIA decided to overthrow a government in the heart of Africa: in the Congo. 200 years before, the Congo had been at the centre of the slave trade. Millions of Africans had been forcibly taken down the river and shipped to America where their forced labour fuelled America’s rise to economic power. Now, the country had been given independence by its old colonial rulers, the Belgiums. But it was completely unprepared and had collapsed into violence. The CIA were frightened that the new prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, was about to turn for help to the Soviet Union … and they helped install a dictator in his place: he was called Colonel Mobutu whose brutal regime the Americans would support for the next 30 years. ibid.
Hong Kong: The BBC continued the fantasy of the special virtues of the Britain’s empire … ‘There’s a genuine fondness for Britain’s decent contribution here.’ ibid. BBC commentary handover ceremony
What the Chinese were doing was using their money to create a safe bubble wrapped around the United States that would stabilise the system and so keep China safe. But in the process the Chinese money would create the biggest consumer and property boom ever in history. And lead America into a protected dream world that was increasingly detached from the reality outside. ibid.
By 2007 the war in Iraq had become a nightmare. The Americans were pouring nearly a billion dollars in every day to keep a conflict going that no-one knew how to win. ibid.
But what the Americans had found themselves doing was exactly the same as the British had done 80 years before: faced by a complex society they did not understand, they were turning to the tribes outside the cities and giving them power. They called the militias the Sons of Iraq and it seemed to work, but in reality it was going to lead to something even worse … They turned and allied instead with the very people they had been fighting. ibid.
Isis was far more than just another version of Al Qaeda in Iraq. Its public face were the jihadists, but it was organised and guided by men from the Sunni tribes, many of whom had been experienced soldiers in Saddam Hussein’s army. As a result, they swept through Iraq and on into Syria. ibid.
The confusion over the Spaghetti House siege proved to be a turned point exposing the messy realities of revolutionary politics. ibid.
On the surface Tupac Shakur was part of the age of the individual. He believed deeply in the idea of self-expression. But he was also one of the few in the 1980s who still believed in the power of grand stories to move people and to inspire them to change the world. His mother Afeni had been a Black Panther and she still believed in the idea of revolution in America. Adam Curtis, Can’t Get You Out of My Head VI Are We a Pigeon? Or Are We Dancer? *****
‘She always raised me to think I was the black prince of the revolution.’ ibid. Tupac
‘We’re not being taught to deal with the world as it is. We’re being taught to deal with this fairyland which we’re not even living in any more.’ ibid. Tupac’s school interview 1988
‘More kids are being handed Crack than are handed diplomas.’ ibid.
By the 1980s it was clear that the promises of the civil rights’ movement had not been kept in America. And the idealism of black politics fell away. And the communities divided into gangs then turned on each other. Then Crack swept through the black communities in America. And a fading Shakur finally gave up: she became addicted to Crack, and Tupac found himself alone. ibid.
Tupac Shakur set out to awaken the radicalism of the Panthers. And to do it he was going to use himself as the central character. ibid.
But there was another country that was like a fairytale land: Saudi Arabia. Ever since the 1970s billions of dollars had flooded in from the West. This vast wave of money created a dream-like society run by an elite where no-one paid any tax. But there were those in Saudi Arabia who saw another much more sinister reality underneath this facade. ibid.
Money has created a society where nobody believes in anything, and nothing can be trusted. ibid.
Part of something that had started 200 years before with the French Revolution: it was the idea that through revolution you could break through to a new kind of world. Something beyond the corrupt reality of this one. ibid.
But when the scientists did this, the computers began to reveal something they hadn’t expected. One tiny change in their equations could have massive catastrophic consequences which they could never have predicted: it was called Chaos Theory. Chaos Theory had a very powerful influence in the West because it rose up at the very moment the Soviet Union was collapsing. And it seemed to explain why all attempts at revolution had led to disaster: the world was just too complex for human beings to change in a predictable way. ibid.
Complexity Theory: Murray Gell-Mann: he believed that there were underlying patterns at every level of the universe, not just in the particles but in the way people think, and the structure in human societies … ‘And it’s fascinating to try and figure out what these laws are.’ ibid.