The Power of Nightmares

I just got done watching Part 1 of this BBC documentary.  It's amazingly good stuff.  Perhaps for me the most interesting part is the history of the Neocons.  It's very interesting to see how they came to be and where they began.

They saw the decay of the country during all the turmoil of the late 60's and Johnson's Great Society and saw that society was coming apart at the seams.  They needed to do something about it.  The teachings of Leo Strauss provided a focus for them, basically saying that all the ills of society were from liberal selfish desires running amuck.  I don't agree with that, but I can at least understand how they might look at it that way.

So, what to do about it?  What if we brought everyone together through some great noble cause!  Say, that just might work!  (Okay, I can still go along in theory.)

Hey, let's make everyone think that the world is so full of evil that the only nation "good" enough to save it is the US.  The Soviet Union provided the perfect arch-enemy.  (Yeah, the Soviets did do some pretty horrible things.  No one can argue with that.  Not even me.)

Why don't we make the Soviets appear to be so horribly evil, so full of hatred and menace, that nobody, not even Stalin's own mother could love them.  And lets overlook the fact that they're destroying themselves from the inside.  Lets convince everyone that they're just making it look that way on purpose, trying to fool the rest of the world into thinking their system is near collapse when really it's a nation of nucular missiles as far as the eye can see.  (Here's where G really gets off board.)

In fact, we should fabricate tales of how wonderfully powerful and formidable they are.  We should make up all kinds of stories about "weapons of mass destruction" (sound familiar?) and if we don't have any evidence we'll just say that their technology is so much more advanced than ours that we can't even detect all these bombs and whatnot that we're sure they have.

Not only that, we'll fabricate more tales about them being behind all terrorism everywhere on the planet.  And we'll convince the CIA chief using evidence the CIA made up.

My head is just spinning with all the What If thoughts swirling around.  Why couldn't the Neocons have decided to bring everyone together to eradicate homelessness?  Or developing green energies?  Or would that just be more liberal gas on the liberal fire?  I'd seen this several months ago and I've forgotten how interesting it is.  Darn shame it's from Netflix and I have to wait a few more days for the second part.  Darn shame indeed.