Adam Curtis came into possession of the BBC footage from Afghanistan over the last 30 years. He posted several short clips now. The first one is the most surreal thing I have ever seen. It’s the Beauty Spa at Bagram Airbase in 2004. The American soldiers getting a manicure from the Russian women. Russian pop songs blazing on. On an American base? Who need spies when you have a Russian barber shop on an American military base? Total, amazing surr. Even beats the live assignation attempt on Hamid Karzai in the second clip - Terabytes Afghanistan (at the end the women are joking around in Russian about an american soldier who is getting a manicure). I mean ”don’t ask”…
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Adam Curtis posted this BBC film on his blog. It’s a documentary filmed in the Bay Area in 1968 by James Mossman. Nothing is staged yet it’s amazing how much one can observe in the regular conversations. Something deeply unsettling about this film. There is the calm, the polite dialogue but under it all is the rage, the bleak slavery of the modern man. America - Democracy on Trial (bottom post there).
P.S. The amount of content and observations I shared on this blog without getting anything in return is unreal. I think people who come here every day as passive consumers are rude apes. Broken souls, transfixed by the TV thinking. Hopeless and unimaginative drones.
Adam Curtis is a master. This must be his most biased series. His omissions are grotesques and glaring. Yet you always learn from his presentations, by making you look from a different perspective on the familiar events he changes your view forever. “This film explores the origins of the 1940s and 50s of Islamic Fundamentalism in the Middle East, and Neoconservatism in America, parallels between these movements, and their effect on the world today:” BBC - The Power of Nightmares ( 2005).
The Israeli flag flies over the crowded upper deck of the illegal immigration ship Exodus, carrying Jewish refugees from war-torn Europe, July 18, 1947 before their expulsion by the British from Haifa port, during the British Mandate of Palestine, in what would in the next year become the State of Israel. Photo by Hans Pinn
Of course there was MS St. Louis turned by the Cubans and the Americans back to the Nazi Europe in 1939 and the famous SS Exodus turned back by the British of the coast of Israel in 1947. Adam Curtis posted a timely 1973 BBC documentary about the Exodus – 21 Miles Off The Coast of Palestine.
Haifa, Palestine. 1948 - Jewish immigrants, arriving in Haifa aboard a refugee ship, waving future flag of the state of Israel shortly before its official conception. Photo by Dmitri Kessel
Psychiatrist Dr. Arthur Perace (L), talking with a schizophrenic patient depressed & withdrawn sitting beside his ward bed, at Wayne County Hosp. Detroit, MI. May 1956. Photo Al Fenn
Adam Curtis describes this history in the first and second episodes of The Trap. In 1973 David Rosenhan staged what was later known as the Rosenhan experiment. Rosenhan and his friends went to 12 psychiatric hospitals in five states. They all were instructed to report “hearing noises” but otherwise act absolutely normal. Every single one was admitted, diagnosed with disorders and given drugs. What’s worse, they were not allowed to discharge from the hospitals till all agreed with the diagnoses. Rosenhan described this scandal to the press. After this story was reported in the press Psychiatric hospitals challenged David Rosenhan to send them more fakes. David agreed and the hospitals promptly discovered a large number of the mental imposters. David Rosenhan then announced that he actually never send anyone. So the hospital were turning away the “real psychiatric patients”. This experiment cast a shadow on the entire discipline. The human factor was questioned.
At the end of the 70s, as a response to the professional challenge and especially with the advent of computers, questionnaires and surveys were sent to hundreds of thousands of people, to determine the mental state of the nation, any human judgment was removed. New disorders are invented at that time, including ADHD, OCD, PDS (various personality disorders), panic disorders, etc. To the astonishment of everyone involved in the surveys, over 50% could be classified as suffering from some of the disorders.
The recognition and the discovered massive scale of problem required drugs. The pharmaceutical companies spent the 80s developing drugs such as Prozac, etc. The ideal model of the “human touch” personalized Psychiatric profession was no longer possible on the scale of the epidemic and the Psychiatry stripped off the “human factor” switched to medicating, on the scale unheard in history. While in the CCCP hundreds of dissidents where forcibly incarcerated into the Psychiatric prisons, in America millions of people were processed through the medication machines with the efficiency of the Auschwitz.
The human despair and sadness became depression. A child’s isolation and loneliness in the sterile suburbia, the anxiety in the face of divorce, the boredom and indoctrination in school, all of it reclassified as ADHD and the gateway to Ritalin. The thrust and the goal was to distribute the blame away from the dysfunctional civilization and onto the people, to confuse the cause and the effect, to reward the docile emotional numbness and induce the emotional numbness on people who refuse to submit to the machine of sameness. This approach and the drugs quickly spread globally. Welcome to the new brave world.
Hmmm, this is a pretty crazy post…
Psychiatrist with an emotionally disturbed student, in front of paintings by emotionally disturbed students at special school. November 1957. NY, NY. Photo by Fritz Goro
Photos licensed for personal non-commercial use only by LIFE
Following “the best documentary ever made” The Century of the Self, in 2007 Adam Curtis produced the three part BBC series The Trap: What Happened to Our Dream of Freedom. The weakness and the strength of Adam Curtis is that he uses the broadest of the strokes. But he is the master of zeroing in on personalities pivotal for the history of ideas. In the third part of The Trap – We Will Force You To Be Free (Google Video) Adam Curtis describes the central ideological confrontation of the post WWII 20th century. On one side was Sir Isaiah Berlin who believed that the terror and the slaughter inevitable in revolutions should be avoided at all costs. Isaiah Berlin argued that a society without coercion, even if it negates progress and promotes inequality (welcome to America), is better than any progressive violent revolutions. On the other side was the inheritor of the French revolutionary tradition Jean-Paul Sartre who preached terror as just and required for progress. The idea was the underpinning of the African revolutionary Frantz Fanon, Yassir Arafat, Pol Pot in Cambodia, Ali Shariati and Ayatollah Khomeini and many “national liberation movements”. ( BTW, the description of the Lubavitcher Rebbe as existentialist is a severe misreading (The Rebbe and French Existentialism by Ephraim Rosenstein). Just the opposite is true (see my post The Offbeat Biography of the Lubavitcher Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson). This is the classic case of confusion between the rhetoric and reality. The Rebbe for sure sided with his relative Isaiah Berlin, but his revolutionary rhetoric was just that. In fact the Rebbe never failed not take sides in any argument, let alone believed in the active and violent overthrows).
At the end of then film there is Tony Blair and the American neo-cons who imagine a revolution without a revolution, without the terror, etc., the position that proved to be unrealistic, especially in Iraq.
P.S. Today Slavoj Zizek is the most visible proponent of the violent revolutionary ethos (video Žižek on Robespierre and la Terreur).
Human Stature of Liberty. 18,000 officers and soldiers at Camp Dodge in Des Moines
The BBC series The Century of the Self created by Adam Curtis, first screened in 2002. Top reason to watch the series:
- Probably the most significant TV documentary ever made.
- It sheds light on Sigmund Freud’s American nephew Edward Bernays who created PR as we know it.
- The rare video footage of Sigmund Freud.
- It explains the obscure but powerful undercurrents of the American and world history.
This is a film of unprecedented significance. I don’t think I ever watched a documentary that is so enlightening and far reaching. Truly life changing in a meaningful way. ►►►read more
Rarefied Reflection No. 1
by Ben Atlas on 12.28.2009.8:35am · 0 comments
I am starting the readers mail format. Issac from NY emails about The Case for the Negative Freedom in Isaiah Berlin v. the Existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre:
Issac, you know several people emailed me about The Trap and The Century of Self that they watched the entire 3-4 hour series in one sitting. Naturally this is because Adam Curtis lifts the veil on many new and pivotal ideas that we not only take for granted but believe to be eternal. Indeed there is a huge flaw in oversimplification of the complex concepts. But you can imagine that delving into the complexity will turn the documentary in an unwatchable page of Talmud. Instead this documentary is the best conversation starter. It’s like Bible that despite being cryptic addresses the visceral dilemmas of our existence. I don’t know much about Hayek, but Nash reappears at the end on the 3rd film, cured from his schizophrenia, to imply that there is more complexity to the game. And this brings me to the second point you make, are people expecting the worse from their fellow citizens, even to larger degree than ever in history?
Indeed, paradoxically the frum culture is the most selfish and unfriendly society, but specifically about the anonymous comments. A religious person is always wearing a mask in public. The true feeling, thoughts, the rebellious and transgressive urges are separated from the public persona. But the internet medium compels transparency and honesty, it induces the real-time expression of the real. For a religious person to speak honestly without a mask is like going naked through a public square, an unnatural act.
So comments on frum blogs are graffiti walls in a school bathroom. Scribbled opinions with no expectation of conversation (the frum blogs are actually worse than a public toilet. In a toilet you can occasionally encounter a draiwing or an original poem but people who leave graffiti on the frum blogs have been indoctrinated into a system that values quotations, someone’s opinion above even the anonymous personal expression). One step up is when people create a name and a character. You can have a dialogue with a character but this is also problematic. As we discussed everything we do, including the conversation is a game . And you have to put some chips on the table to play a game properly. Speaking as some character means that you are playing the game with no chips on the table and it changes what you say to the core. You need a special permission for that but it poisons the well nevertheless.