The Power of Nightmares: Part III

Finally, we come to the conclusion of Adam Curtis' documentary "The Power of Nightmares". In this section, we look deeper into the attacks on New York and the Pentagon on 9/11 and our search for Bin Laden and Al Qaeda after that. This part really had me thinking a lot about us as Americans and as citizens in this country. Also, it brought up bad memories of He Who Should Not Be Name (aka George W. Bush).

I always forget how much I hate George W. until I watch him speak. He is just so unintelligent to me that it is ridiculous. Whenever I see him speak, it still baffles me as to how he was elected not once but TWICE as our president (although I still have my concerns over his first "election" in 2000). The parts of this documentary also make it even more glaringly obvious that all of our military involvement in the Middle East is a continuation of him finishing what his father started. Here's a chart that someone put together of how similar the faces George W. makes to a chimpanzee.

What really stands out to me was when a clip from Bush was included with him stating that it is not the job of the United States to go into other countries when we feel it is necessary and implement change. He said that America is not to think that what we do and how we do it is right and therefore, other people must be like us. This clip was from 2000, yet in 2001, after the 9/11 attacks, Bush pulled a complete 180 and that was essentially the cry of the War on Terror: we have democracy, we're bringing it to them. What they're doing is wrong, and it is our job to right them. Although I do not agree with tyranny and the laws of many Middle Eastern countries, I also believe that it is not our place to jump in and kill civilians under the false premise that we're bringing them democracy. We were completely misled from the beginning of this war, and some are still under the false impression that what we're doing over there is actually helping the people of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Something else interesting that I noticed in the film is the idea of just aimlessly searching for terrorists in not only Afghanistan, but also the United States. There is a clip of a patrol man saying that we do not know what a terrorist looks like, what a terrorist wears, and what kind of car a terrorist drives. However, we still seemed to have found a way to find and detain terrorists, and they were all interestingly enough Muslim or Middle Eastern. Pretty much, that is what we have to base terrorists off of in the United States. If they are Middle Eastern, wear a turban, practice a foreign religion - they must be a terrorist. It's disgusting to think that we really used such shameful stereotyping as this, but we did and still do in this country.

Another standout moment in the film for me was the idea that we are chasing a phantom enemy, rather than getting down to looking into the real reason behind our fear of terrorism and who we are calling terrorists. The American and British troops were scoping out Afghanistan to look for terrorists associate with Bin Laden and Al Qaeda, even though it was discovered that the attacks were planned by a small group of men based around Bin Laden, and the term Al Qaeda wasn't even given to them until we needed a name for our enemy. This stands out to me because it reminds me of what we discuss in class all of the time. Rather than looking for the root causes in society for a problem, we instead look at individual cases and examples and then make up sweeping generalizations about a group of people or an illness. It's really unfortunate and something that our country needs to stop doing. We'd rather just assume that all Arabs are terrorists, rather than think about as a society why we chose them to be our current "Other".

All in all, I really thought this was a smart and thought provoking documentary. Go figure it would need to be done by a British person rather than an American to lay down all of the facts, rather than just glaze over the topics as we have been given them. Also, as I've said before, the parallels between the Neo-Conservative movement and the Radical Islamist movement is really astonishing. I've always personally looked at the Neo-Conservatives as an enemy, specifically as a woman, seeing as how they are looking to essentially strip me of my rights and are attempting to control my body. I think that more Americans could benefit greatly from watching this documentary and learning the actual facts about two movements that are at complete odds, but really have so much in common.