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Adam Curtis (2016) HyperNormalisation.

Henry Kissinger. Assad. Palestinians. Khomeini. Schoolboys, minefields. Suicide bombing. Ronald Reagan. The Lebanon defeat. William Gibson. Cyberspace. John Perry Barlow. The Grateful Dead. Electronic Frontier Foundation. LSD. Phiber Optik. Acid Freak. TRW. Credit history. Imaginary villain, colonel Gaddafi The third universal theory. the IRA. December 1985, Rome and Vienna terrorist attack. Syrian intelligence agencies. Gaddafi took credit. International revolutionary. Live satellite link to mass meeting of the nation of Islam in Chicago. Libya ally of black American struggle. Rocket. Berlin terrorist attack. Pentagon to attack Libya. Fiction constructed by Americans and Gaddafi. European intelligence agencies told America that Syria was behind the attacks. Gaddafi had no friends or allies. April 1986, Americans attacked Libya. UFOs in states. Fake conspiracy. Hi-tech weapons. Paul Benowitz. 1980s belief in UFOs and conspiracies. Perception management. Soviet union implosion, no one saw it coming. Jane Fonda. The old system was dying. Final failure of politics. Manage, not change, a post-political world. Ulrich Beck. Runaway world. Predict future dangers and avoid risks. Deeply conservative world. East Wenatchee, giant computer, future predictor. Larry Fink. BlackRock Aladdin. 7% of world’s total wealth. Prozac. A.I.. MIT. Joseph Weizenbaum. Cumputer psychotherapist, Eliza. Carl Rogers. “What Eliza showed was that in an age of individualism, what made people secure was having themselves reflected back to them, just like in a mirror” (1:25:44). Jess Marcum phonecall from Donald Trump. Akio Kashiwagi. Hacked to death before repaying debt. Assad didn’t want stability, he wanted revenge. December 1988, pan am plane, Lockerbie. Syria. Then Libya. Assad was needed by American and Britain as ally in coming Gulf war against Hussein. Assad not in control of human bomb which jumped from shia to sunni Islam December 1992 Hamas kidnapped Israeli borderguard. 450 members of Hamas arrested, put on bus, taken to mountaintop in southern Lebanon. Spent 6 months there, Hamas militants learned the power of suicide bombing from from Hezbollah, who used it to force Israelis out of Beirut. Group of deportees marched towards Israeli border dressed as martyr, as Israelis shelled them. Hamas began wave of suicide attacks in Israel. Targetting civilians, something Hezbollah had never done. Sheikh Quradawi, mainstream theologian from Egypt, issued a fatwa justifying attacks. Israeli elections of 1996, Benjamin Netanyahu. In America, everyone bacame obsessed by dark foreboding. Films made before 2001. 20 years before 9/11, America had retreated, leaving Syria and suicide bombing to fester, going instead for Gaddafi. Things were simplified. Evil tyrants. Tony Blair and George Bushed obsessed by ridding the world of Saddam Hussein. September 2002, head of MI6 found source. Identical to scenes in The Rock staring Sean Connery and Nicolas Cage. Hafez al-Assad died in 2000. Son Bashar al-Assad (eldest, Bassel died in car crash). Bashar copied father’s suicide bombing in Lebanon. Brought internet to Syria. Favourite band Electric Light Orchestra. Set up to attack America. Through Syria to Iraq. Jihadists joined Al-Queda in Iraq and started to kill shiite. Religious festival targeted in Iraq. Blair & Bush liars at home. Set out to make Gaddafi best friend. Reinvention. Outcast since Lockerbie bombing. Sanctions. Blair announcement, Libya dismantling WMDs.WMDs non existent. West said that if Gaddafi confessed to Lockerbie bombing, sanctions would be lifted. Gaddafi son said father was lying, all were lying. PR companies came to Libya to re-frame narrative. World figures brought to Libya including Anthony Gibbons, whose theory “the third way” had inspired Tony Blair. Gaddafi invited to address the UN. Trump offered Gaddafi tent (like his own) in garden of mansion. People in Britain and Amerca turned away from politics after Iraq lies. Youth, radicals retreated into cyberspace. Judea Pearl. Rational agents. Cartoon version of the world. Online videos. Judea Pearl’s son, Daniel, first online terrorist beheading video. Journalist for Wall Street Journal. Kidnapped by radical Islamists in Pakistan. Confession. Jewish. Wake of 9/11. Optic Nerve took webcam shots. Facebook. People moved into bubbles. Like William Gibson’s cyperspace. Utopian cyperspace reemerged in Occupy. After financial crash in 2008, politicians saved banks but did nothing about corruption for fear of destabeling. Human microphone. Organise without exercising power. Then Arab Spring. First Tunisia, then Egypt. Facebook youth. Emre Gönen. Libya uprising. Gaddafi no longer hero. Creech air force base. Car from Gaddafi’s place. American drone followed. Fired missile. Gaddafi fled from rebel forces. Hid underground in drainage pipe. Libya desended into chaos. Confusion at heart of occupy. New organisation, new society.. but no vision. Revolution was not about an idea but about how you manage things. Same in Egypt. Muslim brotherhood filled vacuum. Spring of 2013, military arrested president and killed supports. Tahir Square. Thousands of liberal activists welcome military back by waving laser pens at military aircraft. No one in the west had any idea about how to change the world. But in Russia, they turned politics into theatre. Fake and truth. Political technologists kept Putin in power for 15 years. Influences by Strugatsky brothers films. Vladislav Surkov came from theatre world. Brought avant garde theatre into politics, not just to manipulate but to go deeper. Funded anti-fascist and neo nazis, political parties opposed to Putin then let all this be known. “It’s a strategy of power that keeps any opposition constantly confused”- Then same in west. Inequality grew. Structure remained. Shapeshifting began with Trump. Used language of Occupy and of racist right. Trump defeated journalists because he didn’t care if he lied. Putin admired. Liberals outraged. Spoke in cyberspace. Messages went only to those who agreed. Benefited corporations. Radical anger became fuel, feeding systems of power. The version of reality politics presented was no longer believable. You could play with reality. Syria. Attack at police station. Battle to death between Bashar al-Assad and opponents. Extremist sunni groups used suicide bombing to start war on Iraq. In Syria, ISIS used suicide bombing to attack not just Bashar but his fellow shiite. Bashar retaliated. Western politicians bewildered. Insisted Bashar was evil, then that opponents were more evil. Britain, America and France bombed terrorist threat which kept Assad in power. Russians intervened, supporting Assad, using strategy that Surkov applied in Ukraine – nonlinear warfare. Aim not to win war but to create constant state of destabilised perception in order to manage and control. March 2016, Russians announced they were leaving Syria but in reality they never left. Winith Syria, new Islamist ideologist determined to exploit uncertainties in west – Abu Masab al-Suri. He originally worked with Osasma bin Laden but turned against him. Al-Suri Lectured, argued that bin Laden had been wrong to attack the west head on because it created massive military response. Instead, individuals should stage random, small scale attacks to spread fear, uncertainty and doubt. Paris. Brexit in UK, Trump in US did as al-Sari predicted. Everything became a risky event. Doomed campaigns became frighteningly real.