The making of the terror myth

By Andy Beckett

Oct. 15 — Since the attacks on the United States in September 2001, there have been more than a thousand references in British national newspapers, almost one every single day, to the phrase “dirty bomb.” There have been articles about how such a device can use ordinary explosives to spread lethal radiation; about how London would be evacuated in the event of such a detonation; about the Home Secretary David Blunkett’s statement on terrorism in November 2002 that specifically raised the possibility of a dirty bomb being planted in Britain; and about the arrests of several groups of people, the latest only last month, for allegedly plotting exactly that.

Starting next Wednesday, BBC2 is to broadcast a three-part documentary series that will add further to what could be called the “dirty bomb genre.” But, as its title suggests, The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear takes a different view of the weapon’s potential.

“I don’t think it would kill anybody,” says Dr. Theodore Rockwell, an authority on radiation, in an interview for the series. “You’ll have trouble finding a serious report that would claim otherwise.” The American Department of Eenergy, Rockwell continues, has simulated a dirty bomb explosion, “and they calculated that the most exposed individual would get a fairly high dose [of radiation], not life-threatening.” And even this minor threat is open to question. The test assumed that no one fled the explosion for one year.

During the three years in which the “war on terror” has been waged, high-profile challenges to its assumptions have been rare. The sheer number of incidents and warnings connected or attributed to the war has left little room, it seems, for heretical thoughts. In this context, the central theme of The Power of Nightmares is riskily counter-intuitive and provocative. Much of the currently perceived threat from international terrorism, the series argues, “is a fantasy that has been exaggerated and distorted by politicians. It is a dark illusion that has spread unquestioned through governments around the world, the security services, and the international media.” The series’ explanation for this is even bolder: “In an age when all the grand ideas have lost credibility, fear of a phantom enemy is all the politicians have left to maintain their power.”

Adam Curtis, who wrote and produced the series, acknowledges the difficulty of saying such things now. “If a bomb goes off, the fear I have is that everyone will say, ‘You’re completely wrong,’ even if the incident doesn’t touch my argument. This shows the way we have all become trapped, the way even I have become trapped by a fear that is completely irrational.”

So controversial is the tone of his series that trailers for it were not broadcast last weekend because of the killing of Kenneth Bigley. At the BBC, Curtis freely admits, there are “anxieties.” But there is also enthusiasm for the programs, in part thanks to his reputation. Over the past dozen years, via similarly ambitious documentary series such as Pandora’s Box, The Mayfair Set and The Century of the Self, Curtis has established himself as perhaps the most acclaimed maker of serious television programs in Britain. His trademarks are long research, the revelatory use of archive footage, telling interviews, and smooth, insistent voiceovers concerned with the unnoticed deeper currents of recent history, narrated by Curtis himself in tones that combine traditional BBC authority with something more modern and skeptical: “I want to try to make people look at things they think they know about in a new way.”

The Power of Nightmares seeks to overturn much of what is widely believed about Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida. The latter, it argues, is not an organized international network. It does not have members or a leader. It does not have “sleeper cells.” It does not have an overall strategy. In fact, it barely exists at all, except as an idea about cleansing a corrupt world through religious violence.

Curtis’ evidence for these assertions is not easily dismissed. He tells the story of Islamism, or the desire to establish Islam as an unbreakable political framework, as half a century of mostly failed, short-lived revolutions and spectacular but politically ineffective terrorism. Curtis points out that al-Qaida did not even have a name until early 2001, when the American government decided to prosecute bin Laden in his absence and had to use anti-Mafia laws that required the existence of a named criminal organization.

Curtis also cites the Home Office’s own statistics for arrests and convictions of suspected terrorists since Sept. 11, 2001. Of the 664 people detained up to the end of last month, only 17 have been found guilty. Of these, the majority were Irish Republicans, Sikh militants or members of other groups with no connection to Islamist terrorism. Nobody has been convicted who is a proven member of al-Qaida.

In fact, Curtis is not alone in wondering about all this. Quietly but increasingly, other observers of the war on terror have been having similar doubts. “The grand concept of the war has not succeeded,” says Jonathan Eyal, director of the British military thinktank the Royal United Services Institute. “In purely military terms, it has been an inconclusive war ... a rather haphazard operation. Al-Qaida managed the most spectacular attack, but clearly it is also being sustained by the way that we rather cavalierly stick the name al-Qaida on Iraq, Indonesia, the Philippines. There is a long tradition that if you divert all your resources to a threat, then you exaggerate it.”

Bill Durodie, director of the international center for security analysis at King’s College London, says: “The reality [of the al-Qaida threat to the west] has been essentially a one-off. There has been one incident in the developed world since 9/11 [the Madrid bombings]. There’s no real evidence that all these groups are connected.”

Crispin Black, a senior government intelligence analyst until 2002, is more cautious but admits the terrorist threat presented by politicians and the media is “out of date and too one-dimensional. We think there is a bit of a gulf between the terrorists’ ambition and their ability to pull it off.”

Terrorism, by definition, depends on an element of bluff. Yet ever since terrorists in the modern sense of the term (the word terrorism was actually coined to describe the strategy of a government, the authoritarian French revolutionary regime of the 1790s) began to assassinate politicians and then members of the public during the 19th century, states have habitually overreacted. Adam Roberts, professor of international relations at Oxford, says that governments often believe struggles with terrorists “to be of absolute cosmic significance,” and that therefore “anything goes” when it comes to winning. The historian Linda Colley adds: “States and their rulers expect to monopolize violence, and that is why they react so virulently to terrorism.”

Britain may also be particularly sensitive to foreign infiltrators, fifth columnists and related menaces. In spite, or perhaps because of, the absence of an actual invasion for many centuries, British history is marked by frequent panics about the arrival of Spanish raiding parties, French revolutionary agitators, anarchists, bolsheviks and Irish terrorists. “These kind of panics rarely happen without some sort of cause,” says Colley. “But politicians make the most of them.”

They are not the only ones who find opportunities. “Almost no one questions this myth about al-Qaida because so many people have got an interest in keeping it alive,” says Curtis. He cites the suspiciously circular relationship between the security services and much of the media since September 2001: the way in which official briefings about terrorism, often unverified or unverifiable by journalists, have become dramatic press stories which -- in a jittery media-driven democracy -- have prompted further briefings and further stories. Few of these ominous announcements are retracted if they turn out to be baseless: “There is no fact-checking about al-Qaida.”

In one sense, of course, Curtis himself is part of the al-Qaida industry. The Power of Nightmares began as an investigation of something else -- the rise of modern American conservatism. Curtis was interested in Leo Strauss, a political philosopher at the university of Chicago in the 1950s who rejected the liberalism of postwar America as amoral and who thought that the country could be rescued by a revived belief in America’s unique role to battle evil in the world. Strauss’s certainty and his emphasis on the use of grand myths as a higher form of political propaganda created a group of influential disciples such as Paul Wolfowitz, now the US deputy defense secretary. They came to prominence by talking up the Russian threat during the cold war and have applied a similar strategy in the war on terror.

As Curtis traced the rise of the “Straussians,” he came to a conclusion that would form the basis for The Power of Nightmares. Straussian conservatism had a previously unsuspected amount in common with Islamism: from origins in the 1950s, to a formative belief that liberalism was the enemy, to an actual period of Islamist-Straussian collaboration against the Soviet Union during the war in Afghanistan in the 1980s (both movements have proved adept at finding new foes to keep them going). Although the Islamists and the Straussians have fallen out since then, as the attacks on America in 2001 graphically demonstrated, they are in another way, Curtis concludes, collaborating still: in sustaining the “fantasy” of the war on terror.

Some may find all this difficult to swallow. But Curtis insists, “There is no way that I’m trying to be controversial just for the sake of it.” Neither is he trying to be an anti-conservative polemicist like Michael Moore: “[Moore’s] purpose is avowedly political. My hope is that you won’t be able to tell what my politics are.” For all the dizzying ideas and visual jolts and black jokes in his programs, Curtis describes his intentions in sober, civic-minded terms. “If you go back into history and plod through it, the myth falls away. You see that these aren’t terrifying new monsters. It’s drawing the poison of the fear.”

But whatever the reception of the series, this fear could be around for a while. It took the British government decades to dismantle the draconian laws it passed against French revolutionary infiltrators; the cold war was sustained for almost half a century without Russia invading the west, or even conclusive evidence that it ever intended to. “The archives have been opened,” says the cold war historian David Caute, “but they don’t bring evidence to bear on this.” And the danger from Islamist terrorists, whatever its scale, is concrete. A skeptical observer of the war on terror in the British security services says: “All they need is a big bomb every 18 months to keep this going.”

The war on terror already has a hold on western political culture. “After a 300-year debate between freedom of the individual and protection of society, the protection of society seems to be the only priority,” says Eyal. Black agrees: “We are probably moving to a point in the UK where national security becomes the electoral question.”

Some critics of this situation see our striking susceptibility during the 90s to other anxieties -- the millennium bug, MMR, genetically modified food -- as a sort of dress rehearsal for the war on terror. The press became accustomed to publishing scare stories and not retracting them; politicians became accustomed to responding to supposed threats rather than questioning them; the public became accustomed to the idea that some sort of apocalypse might be just around the corner. “Insecurity is the key driving concept of our times,” says Durodie. “Politicians have packaged themselves as risk managers. There is also a demand from below for protection.” The real reason for this insecurity, he argues, is the decay of the 20th century’s political belief systems and social structures: people have been left “disconnected” and “fearful.”

Yet the notion that “security politics” is the perfect instrument for every ambitious politician from Blunkett to Wolfowitz also has its weaknesses. The fears of the public, in Britain at least, are actually quite erratic: when the opinion pollsters Mori asked people what they felt was the most important political issue, the figure for “defense and foreign affairs” leapt from 2 percent to 60 percent after the attacks of September 2001, yet by January 2002 had fallen back almost to its earlier level. And then there are the twin risks that the terrors politicians warn of will either not materialize or will materialize all too brutally, and in both cases the politicians will be blamed. “This is a very rickety platform from which to build up a political career,” says Eyal. He sees the war on terror as a hurried improvisation rather than some grand Straussian strategy: “In democracies, in order to galvanize the public for war, you have to make the enemy bigger, uglier and more menacing.”

Afterwards, I look at a website for a well-connected US foreign policy lobbying group called the Committee on the Present Danger. The committee features in The Power of Nightmares as a vehicle for alarmist Straussian propaganda during the cold war. After the Soviet collapse, as the website puts it, “The mission of the committee was considered complete.” But then the website goes on: “Today radical Islamists threaten the safety of the American people. Like the cold war, securing our freedom is a long-term struggle. The road to victory begins ...”

Source: Guardian (UK)

When recycling stirs creative juices

By Humberto Márquez

Caracas, Venezuela, Oct 23 (IPS) -- An exhibit of paintings and sculptures produced with recycled materials has arrived at the Sofía Imber Museum of Contemporary Art in Caracas after nine years of traveling around public spaces.

“Before the works were seen by thousands of people in shopping malls and subway stations. Now those people, including large numbers of kids and students from working class neighborhoods, are coming to the museum,’’ Marian Krasner, the organizer of the exhibit, told IPS.

The Art of Recycling show is coordinated by Pronóstico, a group run by Krasner. This year’s exhibit includes works by 40 artists, selected from close to 100 entries submitted.

While the show is an annual event, Krasner feels that its arrival at the Sofía Imber Museu -- one of the most prestigious institutions of its kind in Latin America -- has brought it to a whole new level.

In Caracas, this effort to attract more members of the public into the city’s museums is not limited to the Sofía Imber.

The directors of the Arturo Michelena Museum, which is named after a renowned 19th century Venezuelan painter and houses part of his work, are pursuing the same goal by having reproductions of the masterpieces hanging on its walls painted as murals on the streets of the surrounding neighborhood.

A key element in the exhibit of recycling-based works is to “surprise the viewer by using materials that aren’t normally seen in works of art, and would usually be thrown away.’’

Nuri Morillo, one of the participants, evoked the age-old question of the chicken and the egg by asking, “Which came first, the garbage or the idea? Sometimes you’re just walking down the street, past a trash bin, and a light goes off.

“For most of us here, while we’re out walking around, we pay more attention to the garbage on the street than to anything else. I pick up trash and then work on creating a piece around it,’’ she added.

Elizabeth Navarrete is the artist behind a sculpture entitled “Recycling Values,’’ in which coins, glue and tape are used to craft small plaques celebrating virtues like faith, hope, courage and wisdom.

The titles of several of the pieces turn on clever plays on words in Spanish. For example, the title of Marisol García’s contribution, “Ya Ves?’’ (You See?) is pronounced identically to the Spanish word “llaves,’’ meaning keys, one of the primary materials used for the work, along with wood and wax.

And María Cartoni’s “Idientidad’’ (a combination of the Spanish word for identity and “diente,’’ or tooth) was assembled from old dentures.

Derje van Dillewijn’s piece, “Keeping the World in Check,’’ is a giant chessboard made of discarded CD cases, topped with discs transformed into tiny collages. The kings in his chess set are none other than US President George W. Bush and deposed Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.

Santiago Aguirre, who has participated in the show for the last seven years, remarked: ‘’Every year is a surprise. I never cease to be amazed by the creativity shown with materials that others would just scorn.’’

Aguirre’s own sculpture, “Troy,’’ is over one and half meters high and made entirely with discarded wood he found while walking around. For her part, Rosalía Salerno created her piece, “Menina’’ — a tribute to Spanish painter Diego Velázquez — out of cardboard boxes that still bear the General Electric label.

“Year after year we raise awareness about recycling, about not littering or throwing garbage on the streets, and the public is very receptive,’’ said Morillo.

The use of non-traditional materials and “found’’ objects played an integral part in such 20th-century artistic movements as Dada and Pop Art.

“From this viewpoint, nothing should be wasted, anything can be reused, whether it’s cans, nails, glass, wood, coins, pieces of toys, CDs, whatever,’’ Krasner said.

Pronóstico has organized weekly meetings between the artists and the public to discuss the potential uses of waste materials. “It’s rewarding and educational,’’ commented Marta Szinetar, another participant in the exhibit.

The show is not a competition, and no prizes are awarded, “which makes it extremely clean and pure, free of any kind of favoritism,’’ according to Morillo. It is also a way of “opening up spaces for young and innovative artists,’’ Krasner added.

The 9th annual Art of Recycling exhibit opened in Caracas on Sept. 26 and ends Oct. 24. The organizers are also considering the possibility of taking it to other cities in Venezuela.

One thing is for certain: creators of recycled art will never lack for materials, because the downtown streets surrounding the Sofía Imber Museum of Contemporary Arts, like the streets of so many big cities, are overflowing with garbage.