Hugh Nicoll's Blog

Ken Hagler, one of my fellow Tinderbox Weekenders in San Francisco last October, posted a link to a Common Dreams article by Thomas Hartmann, Hyping Terror for Fun, Profit — And Power, which reports on the Adam Curtis documentary aired by the BBC last October and November. Streaming video versions of The Power of Nightmares are available on line, as are transcripts. A larger screen version of the third program with better audio can be found on Alex Jones’ Prison Planet site.

The documentary is very well researched, as Hartmann noted, and makes one of the the best arguments against the nonsense the passes for mainstream political discourse these days. As Donny Trivette used to say, “Scare me, boy!”

Jonathan Raban on “The Power of Nightmares”

Fast-moving, full of ingenious musical and cinematic puns, Curtis’s series is best watched as an epic political cartoon in the manner of Daumier or Ralph Steadman. It freely bends the facts to fit its vision, it distorts, it overcolors, it grossly—and entertainingly—simplifies, yet, as only a cartoon can, it captures an aspect of its subject that has so far escaped even the most skeptical observers of the war on terror.

Raban writes approvingly of the sober assessment in Stephen Flynn’s America the Vulnerable: How Our Government Is Failing to Protect Us from Terrorism, HarperCollins, 234 pp., $25.95.