The phantom menace
By Tony Davis December 5, 2005
This filmmaker claims corrupted ideas drive terrorists and their opponents. Tony Davis reports.
Al-Qaeda does not really exist, at least not in the form we understand it. The image of a huge, well-co-ordinated international terrorist network was created by Western politicians for their own ends.
As propositions go, this is a provocative one and, to some people no doubt, thoroughly offensive, but it is confidently argued by English documentary maker Adam Curtis in the classy three-part series The Power of Nightmares, which airs in Australia this week.
Nightmares caused a huge stir when it was shown on the BBC last year and again in February. One caustic email said: "I wonder what you will feel, Mr Curtis, when a bomb goes off in London?"
Since then London has suffered a terrorist campaign. So how did he feel? "I live right in the centre of London, and I felt fear like everyone else," Curtis told the Guide when discussing the suicide bombings of July 7. "I heard the bomb on the bus go off, because it was literally around the corner. I thought these things are too horrible to try to rationally analyse ... fear takes over your body and your mind.
"What I then did was I went back and looked at The Power of Nightmares again, and I stand by everything I said."
Curtis stresses that he never denied that the West is facing a serious terrorist threat. "What I was challenging was this apocalyptic vision of an organised network with a power unlike anything we have ever experienced before, run by a man in a cave in Afghanistan. What we face is a fragmented and corrupted idea which inspires groups and individuals around the world, which have no necessary connection with each other."
Curtis says he is no polemicist. He specialises in what he calls contemporary historical journalism and believes if you look at the origins of ideas and the way they have been interpreted, and at times misinterpreted, you can understand a lot about the present.
A previous Curtis documentary series, The Century of the Self, dealt with how Sigmund Freud's theories have been adapted, including by his nephew, Edward Bernays, who is widely considered the father of public relations. (Bernays popularised the ominous expression "engineering consent".)
In the case of radical Islam, Curtis says you need to examine the ideas propagated by Sayed Qutb, who lived in the US in the 1940s but returned to his Egyptian homeland preaching that his own country needed to do everything to avoid replicating American society, which he saw as empty and selfish.
And on the other side, Curtis says, you need to understand how the neo-conservatives in the US also fear an empty and selfish society and how, influenced by political philosopher Leo Strauss, they have deliberately divided the world into good and bad.
"They believe that people need to have unifying beliefs to pull them together, to give them a sense of purpose, otherwise a country just declines into a sort of weak, vapid consumerism. They had the best motives, but what trapped them I think is their mind-set, which is that of the Cold War."
Curtis is amazed that no one before him had produced a history of the ideas that led to the attacks of September 11 and, equally, to the response mounted by the Americans. What he found in his research - conducted over two years in Europe, the Middle East and the US - challenges many popular Western beliefs about people such as Osama bin Laden and his mentor, Ayman Zawahiri. "They failed in the 1990s. The 9/11 attack was a lashing out. Far from being a strong act of a confident movement, it was that of a weak movement, desperately facing failure. And we misunderstood it, because we didn't understand the history."
Curtis says he doesn't take sides and is wary of filmmakers such as Michael Moore and John Pilger. "[They] find themselves in a straitjacket into which they have to shoehorn things. The jacket I wear constantly changes shape. I think you shape your films and their critical analysis as much on empirical evidence as on the ideas that you have in your mind, or your personal view of the world."
The Power of Nightmares airs from Tuesday to Thursday at 8.30pm on SBS.