Bitter Lake - the BBC as a subversive organisation

Bitter Lake is a film by Adam Curtis: http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p02gyz6b/adam-curtis-bitter-lake. If the BBC did nothing else but make this available it would be worth the licence fee – I doubt you’ll ever see it on Sky, it’s not Rupe’s cup of tea. It’s described as:

“a new, adventurous and epic film that explains why the big stories that politicians tell us have become so simplified that we can’t really see the world any longer”.

The film claims ‘the west became a dangerous and destructive force in the world‘. Most of the content is home or handheld video footage and it covers the middle east from 1946 to today, takes in banking’s takeover of geopolitics, oil and the rest. That’s quite a spread.

In 1946 the US set up a little colony in Afghanistan to ‘improve’ the country. Why Afghanistan? you may ask, I did, then I looked at a map.

Gosh, it seems Afghanistan bordered the USSR. So the US established ‘Little America’, as it became known, to build huge irrigation projects to modernise and westernise Afghanistan. The resultant saline soil was perfect for poppy growing.

Bitter Lake is intercut with lovely little scenes from ‘Carry on up the Khyber’ – hinting at farce repeating itself as history do you think?

Captain Keene: [news of the native revolt arrives] What do you intend to do, sir?
Sir Sidney Ruff-Diamond: Do? Do? We’re British. We won’t do anything…
Major Shorthouse:…until it’s too late.
Sir Sidney Ruff-Diamond: Exactly. That’s the first sensible thing you’ve said all day.

On the way the film takes in the US relationship with Iraq, the development of Wahhabi Islam and Iraq’s funding of Madrassas in Pakistan.

Culture clash doesn’t quite describe the west’s history of interference in the middle east. There’s a perfect image in the film where, as part of the coalition’s educational programme to persuade Afghanis of what they were missing, an extremely nice young british woman delivers a powerpoint lecture on conceptual art to a mixed group of Afghan men and women. Conceptual art is illustrated with a slide of a urinal – the first piece of conceptual art. She tells them the urinal was a political statement – the audience were probably quite familiar with political statements of another kind but not urinals. It’s fair to say the level of incomprehension on both sides was extreme.

The problem with seeing things as simplistically as right and wrong, good and bad (with us as the right and the good of course) is that it doesn’t keep us safe. Polarised views are dangerous – workshy/hard-working families, immigrant floods/refugees, free world/subjugated people, blacks/whites, jews/christians/moslems, Donald Trump/anyone else (except Palin!).

The US right seems to think if it could make the world in its image (and keep out migrants and arm school kids) we could all sleep at night. As President Regan said (and probably believed), ‘We have it in our power to begin the world over again‘

I sometimes think many Americans are brought up to salute the flag and watch Fox News – the equivalent in the UK of learning to read from the Daily Mail. That’s unfair of course and, without exception, the Americans I’ve met have been extremely nice, polite and generous, like the soldier below. Most Americans never travel abroad we’re told, so their view of the world is bound to be an odd one.

After all the US is God’s own country which I guess is why you can’t become president without boasting about the country’s greatness, invoking a Christian God at every turn and having a very big bag of money to share out.

Unfortunately, to stay safe, Americans have the largest military machine ever known and, of course, the right to carry arms. As a result:

the United States most likely has been responsible since WWII for the deaths of between 20 and 30 million people in wars and conflicts scattered over the world. http://www.countercurrents.org/lucas240407.htm
In order to defend its freedoms, at home it kills its own: 33,636 people died of gunshot in 2013 (that’s actually less than died from drugs or motor vehicles but still a tad high). http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/injury.htm The US population is around 320 million. Within the EU (population 508.2 million) approximately 6700 persons die each year as a result of gunshot wounds.
and
In October 2013, the incarceration rate of the United States of America was the highest in the world, at 716 per 100,000 of the national population. While the United States represents about 4.4 percent of the world’s population, it houses around 22 percent of the world’s prisoners.

Surely something isn’t working.

It’s understandable but unhelpful for the right in the UK to attack anyone who asks ‘how did we get to this?’ or worse, ‘Was it our (government’s) fault.’ It’s easy to attack Corbyn and others as weak on terror whenever they speculate on how we arrived here. The film Bitter Lake offers a pretty compelling explanation and you can still watch it.

Bitter Lake – the BBC as a subversive organisation4 min read

Watch the film, it’s incredibly moving and disturbing. Make your own mind up.