https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FyuYGMeyJUQ
Islam and Neo-Conservatism in unholy allliance…once again……apparently…
We have another of the BBC’s favoured sons, Adam Curtis, who once told us that Al Qaeda didn’t exist, purely an invention of the government to keep us frightened and obedient, again given a platform on the BBC to spout his obsessive conspiracy theories and anti-Western rhetoric.
He has now produced a continuation of that theme first aired in his ‘The Power of Nightmares’ with his latest effort ‘Bitter Lake’ in which we get his very own special intepretation of history… as his introduction reveals:
Increasingly we live in a world where little makes any sense, events come and go like waves of a fever leaving us confused and uncertain. Those in power tell stories to make us make sense of the complexity of reality but those stories are increasingly unconvincing and hollow. This is a film about why those stories stopped making sense and why that led us in the West to become a dangerous and destructive force in the world.
The blurb to the film tells us…..
The film reveals the forces that over the past thirty years rose up and undermined the confidence of politics to understand the world. And it shows the strange, dark role that Saudi Arabia has played in this.
But Bitter Lake is also experimental. Curtis has taken the unedited rushes of everything that the BBC has ever shot in Afghanistan – and used them in new and radical ways.
He has tried to build a different and more emotional way of depicting what really happened in Afghanistan. A counterpoint to the thin, narrow and increasingly destructive stories told by those in power today.
Very nice that the BBC provides a platform for someone who is an ardent, and very obsessive, conspiracy theorist to peddle his theories.
The Guardian asks…
In his latest iPlayer-only film Bitter Lake, furtive filmmaker Adam Curtis uses his dreamlike documentary style to make sense of the west’s involvement in Afghanistan. But is he an audacious auteur or a dangerous contrarian?
Here is an example of his take on history…
Curtis is about to return with a new film, a two-and-a-half-hour BBC iPlayer-only epic called Bitter Lake. It takes as its premise a meeting in February 1945 between the then US president Franklin D Roosevelt and King Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia. Sitting on a yacht on the Great Bitter Lake of the Suez Canal, the pair struck a deal: the US would support this newly formed state and, in return, the Saudis would ensure a continuing stream of oil to the west. From that one point, argues Curtis, came the spread of Wahhabi Islam….
A very simplistic and childish view of history from Curtis with the benefit of a rather unreliable but convenient hind-sight. He seems to think no one should do anything as a single action might have terrible unforeseen consequences…or that is what he must infer following his own logic and scathing conclusions in the wake of historical US actions and their repercussions as he sees them.
Does Curtis think that the oil would have stayed in the ground had there been no agreement? Saudi Arabia would still have raked in the cash whoever bought the oil and provided ‘protection’ for the Saudi regime…..the USSR would have quickly stepped in as it did with Syria and Egypt….and the funds to spread fundamentalist Islam around the world would still have flooded into the Saudi coffers….no coincidence that the Russian state broadcaster finds ‘Bitter lake’ a superb bit of TV….BBC documentary ‘Bitter Lake’ is ‘too dangerous’ for TV
The film concentrates on Afghanistan and adopts the BBC’s approach of painting the war there as an utter failure…and uses the ‘prism of Afghanistan’ to illuminate the tumble of world events over the last few decades.
Once again we have a confirmed lefty telling us we understand nothing, that we are being lied to, and he has the answers.
Well, People understand quite a lot thanks…People understand the BBC has been lying to them about immigration, Europe and Islam for years now…they understand that and vote UKIP.
People understand. They don’t need some self-appointed left-wing, intellectual film maker patronising them and ‘teaching’ them what to think.
They know what is going on….despite all the BBC’s best efforts to kid them.
And this Curtis film is just more evidence that the BBC doesn’t get it…or rather does, and doesn’t like what it sees as people flock to UKIP….and I have to say it is just another example of the Left’s hypocrisy over Islam….attacking Saudi Arabia, which is the spiritual and actual home of Islam, and yet telling us that the Saudis don’t really represent the authentic Islam….and then telling us that Muslims in the UK who follow the same Saudi traditions, are ‘moderate, tolerant Muslims’.
What did the Americans think about the Saudi King in 1945?…..
Arabs probably better than any other American of
his generation:
‘The Guardian of the Holy Places of Islam,
and the nearest we have to a successor to the
Caliphs, the Defender of the Muslim Faith
and of the Holy Cities of three hundred mil-
lion people, cemented a friendship with the
head of a great Western and Christian nation.’
Sounds pretty certain that Saudi Arabia is the epicentre of the Islamic faith and not some propagator of a false version of Islam…they should know after all….Muhammed having come from that very region himself.
Curtis’ film is essentially a YouTube polemic…scratchily put together made up from clips of film that he has taken a fancy to and supposedly tell a coherent tale….each one no doubt has meaning to Curtis but the viewer is left in a certain amount of bewildered confusion…ironic for a film that is supposed to bring the world into focus. What do the clips mean in the context of the film? Difficult to tell much of the time….you just wait until the narrative restarts and you get a semblance of order once more.
Curtis would have been better off sticking with a standard narrative form that told the story he wanted to get across. Instead we have a ‘Tumblr’ type mash of images and themes that are more a stream of consciousness than a coherent and easy to follow story.
It would have been a lot shorter had he cut out the self-indulgent images that served only his own ideological purpose of protraying the West and its actions as ‘dangerous and destructive’.
For instance he related a tale about the construction of dams in Afghanistan…concluding that they caused the soil to become saline, which is true for some areas…and from that we were led to believe that poppies became almost the only crop that could be grown successfully there….so he blames the US for helping to build the dams and thence flood the world not with water but heroin.
Trouble is that’s not true….as this BBC article shows……a vastly different portrayal of Afghanistan and its history…..
Afghanistan once faced the future with confidence.
Caught here on film, it’s an era the world has forgotten
And despite the setbacks, Helmand began to bloom. Residents and visitors alike remember the bright green of the settlements and orchards along the Helmand river.
Farming increased, harvesting a surplus even at times of drought. Farmers grew and exported cotton for cash in thousands of tonnes. Few even recognised the flower of the opium poppy, according to Farouq Azam.
Agriculture, especially cotton and grain production, continued to expand until Helmand supplied a fifth of Afghanistan’s wheat harvest.
So already we have Curtis twisting history to his own purpose and painting Western aid to Afghanistan as the cause of much misery when that clearly was not the case….claiming that tribal and ethnic differences were stirred up by these projects….again the BBC’s own article refutes that…..
Approximately one million Afghans moved to the Helmand Valley at this time, drawn by the prospect of jobs, good schools and prospects. Very many of these were educated people – their children would be the first in Afghanistan to have the option of single-sex or mixed schools.
People of every ethnicity and many languages lived side by side in Lashkar Gah, some in modern American-built houses with lawns, low fences and front gardens.
“It was such a happy time,” says Saeeda Mahmood, daughter of Kamoliddin Mahmood, the civil servant who also ran the cinema:
We grew up all together. No-one said, you are this, and we are that. Some of our neighbours were Americans. We used to invite them at Eid, they’d invite us for their parties. I remember Santa Claus would come, on a donkey, bringing us all presents.”
The film is over two hours long and makes for a very hard watch….both from an aesthetic and technical point of view but also if you have any regard for the truth in history.
Curtis up to his polemical and dishonest tricks once again.
Not worth watching when there is so much out here of better quality and which doesn’t have such a hysterical and ideologically entrenched view of history. Life is too short to waste your time on this tripe.
Have a read of this scathing review in the Spectator of Curtis’ masterpiece...’the ‘televisual equivalent of a drunken late night Wikipedia binge with pretension for narrative coherence’…..it’s from an unlikely source…a Guardian journalist…
In fact Afghans have consistently demonstrated their wish to join the 21st century. After more than a decade of trying the Taliban have failed to gain more than a slither of popular support. Democracy in Afghanistan is flawed, but with Afghans continuing to go the polls, it has not failed, as Curtis baldly states.
As Lotfullah Najafizada, one of the country’s leading journalists, put it last year, a sneering western media might have written off Afghanistan’s ‘decade of war’. But, ‘for us, it’s a decade of peace’.
Jon Boone is Pakistan correspondent for the Guardian
