A security detachment made up of border guards and police officers had been assigned to guard the entrances to the Olympics village. 250 guards dressed in civilian uniforms and without guns. ibid. dude
Olympic Village, 5th September 4 a.m.: When we got there, everything was quiet. It was four o’clock in the morning. We arrived and jumped over the fence. ibid. Palestinian
After seizing the hostages, the perpetrators issued a leaflet containing a demand that should be familiar to all of you. ibid. Manfred Schreiber, rozzer
That’s when people started hating the Palestinians. ibid. Palestinian
Eleven dead athletes lying one on top of another with their hands tied. ibid.
But visitor numbers to Tunisia have plummeted since two deadly terror attacks in 2015 in which 59 tourists were killed. Mediterranean with Simon Reeve III, BBC 2018
April 1999: London in the UK was the centre of an unprecedented terror attack. A lone right-wing fanatic went on a one-man rampage killing three people and injuring hundreds. Crimes that Shook Britain s2e1: The London Nail Bombings, CI 2011
The make-shift bomb packed with nails and stuffed into a plastic box had been sat at Brixton Market for over thirty minutes. ibid.
The bomb had originally been placed at a bus-stop then moved three times before detonating outside the Iceland store. ibid.
Brick Lane: Almost to the hour, seven days on from Brixton, police were dealing with another terrorist attack. ibid.
The terrorist had struck a third time. The device tore through Soho causing the biggest devastation so far. ibid.
He freely discussed his reign of terror. ibid.
Copeland was adamant he acted alone. ibid.
The age that we have just left – the 45 years since the end of the Second World War, was overshadowed by a strange partnership between Science and Fear. It began with a weapon created by scientists that threatened to destroy the world. But then a group of men who were convinced they could control the new danger began to gain influence in America. They would manipulate terror; to do so they would use the methods of science. Out of this would come a new age free from the chaos and uncertainties that had led to terrible wars in the past. Adam Curtis, Pandora’s Box II: To the Brink of Eternity, BBC 1992
Research and Development: RAND was funded by the air force, but staffed by young academics who believed the scientific method could help bring the Cold War back under America’s control. ibid.
They were no longer advisers to the military, they had become the masters. ibid.
In a controlled nuclear war populations of cities would become like pawns in a game of bargaining with nuclear weapons. So the strategists persuaded America’s leaders to take civil defense seriously. ibid.
In the end President Kennedy ignored any idea of controlled war. Instead, he told the Russians that if they launched one missile from Cuba, he would retaliate with America’s entire arsenal. To the strategists, this threat was irrational and humiliating. ibid.
The systems and numbers approach dominated the Pentagon. McNamara’s wizz-kids were convinced that the battle against the Viet-Cong could be managed in a rational, scientific way. ibid.
What they [the Strategists] left behind was MAD – mutual assured destruction – a giant system of nuclear defence with the two sides locked together, watching each other for the slightest move. But by the mid-’70s it seemed to have become an end in itself. ibid.
The system of deterrents had begun as rational. It now seemed a dangerous trap. ibid.
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 that 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.
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-Conservative 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.
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.
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 majority of terrorist 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.
The other part of Project Democracy was to use military force in secret operations to overthrow foreign regimes that stood in the way of freedom. The main target was the government of Nicaragua, the Sandinistas. The Sandinistas were Marxist revolutionaries who had seized power in 1979; but since then they had held elections and had been democratically elected. The Reagan administration dismissed this though as a sham. And an operation was set up to enforce the right kind of democracy by overthrowing the Sandinistas if necessary. The man in charge was a leading neo-Conservative Elliott Abrams. Adam Curtis, The Trap I: We Will Force You to be Free, BBC 2007
[Isaiah] Berlin’s warning would become a prophecy. Ironically, this corruption of negative liberty would begin with the resurgence of positive liberty. In the wake of the Soviet disaster, a new and even more extreme version of positive liberty was about to rise up in the Third World. It would be a revolutionary vision of transforming individuals through violence. It would spread and begin to destabilise the balance of power in the world. In response, the followers of negative liberty in the West would decide that they had to confront and roll back this tide. Out of this would emerge a strange mutant idea. You would use violent revolutionary techniques to create a world of negative freedom. Adam Curtis, The Trap III: We Will Force You to be Free, BBC 2007