This documentary chronicles the sickening depths to which our republic has fallen. Veteran documentary filmmaker and conspiracy personality Alex Jones conclusively proves the existence of a secret network of FEMA camps, now being expanded nationwide. The military industrial complex is transforming our once free nation into a giant prison camp. A cashless society control grid, constructed in the name of fighting terrorism, was actually built to enslave the American people. Body scanners, sound cannons, citizen spies, staged terror and cameras on every street corner — it’s only the beginning of the New World Order’s hellish plan.

This film exposes how the “Continuity of Government” program has established an all powerful shadow state. Prepare to enter the secretive world of emergency dictatorship, FEMA camps, and a shredded Constitution. Witness police and military savagely attacking innocent citizens as our own government unleashes false flag operations to justify its oppression.

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This philosophy is stated very clearly in the MindWar paper written by NSA General Aquino. The DOD has a huge stake in futuristic technology that kills by ionizing and non-ionizing radiation, leaving little or no trace. The indiscriminant killing of the Phoenix Program continues on American soil. The terms soft kill, slow kill and silent kill refer to the new way of killing the enemy in conflicts short of war and the small wars of the future. The counterinsurgency doctrine has now been applied to the home front, so that the perceived betrayal of the military in Vietnam will not be repeated.

The generation of CIA and military intelligence led by Shackley, Helms, Casey, Abrams, Singlaub, Secord, John B. Alexander, Michael Aquino, Paul Vallely, and others have built the perfect beast, using selective assassination that leaves no trace.

The ability to cull the human herd with Silent Kill technology allows a few personalities to remake the entire society in their own image.

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The film exposes the agenda that Obama was put in place to accomplish, a world government allied with a bank of the world run by globalist eugenicists hell-bent on destroying America’s first world status and replacing it with a hollow shell of tyranny.

The mind control, the television programming, and all the media talking points that serve to reinforce the image of Brand Obama are laid bare, unveiling the naked ruth, as legendary author and documentary film maker John Pilger recently discussed, that Obama is nothing more than a corporate marketing creation, a skilled hypnotist using seductive tools of propaganda – race, gender and class – to hoodwink the masses into accepting his rhetoric while ignoring the contradiction of his actions.

The film exposes how Brand Obama says one thing – to make people buy into the brand – and then the real Obama does another.

The burgeoning police state, warrantless wiretapping, secret arrests, indefinite detention of citizens, torture, the war in Afghanistan, the war in Pakistan, have all been expanded under Brand Obama despite his promises to reverse them all.

The real question to ask is not which class Obama claims to represent or fight for, but which class Obama serves. Fall of the Republic leaves no room for doubt that the class Obama serves is the elite and it is their agenda he is diligently following.

In terms of focused research and factual content, Fall of the Republic dominates even The Obama Deception for hardcore evidence and documented material. The film proves how Obama was put in power to cement the gains of tyranny and oppression achieved under Bush while the masses slept, lulled into a deep hypnosis with empty promises of change, hope and progress.

The movie picks up from where The Obama Deception left off, highlighting how Obama has continued and expanded the socialized financial takeover introduced by Bush and how the bankster gangster cronies have made off with trillions in taxpayer’s money, bankrupting the future of the country for generations to come.\

The hypocrisy and underlying deceit of people like Al Gore, John P. Holdren and Obama himself are displayed in plain view as the cap and trade hoax is demolished and revealed to be nothing less than a total takeover of the American economy, its infrastructure, and a mandate to micromanage every aspect of every citizen’s private life.

Obama’s role in converting American from a free market, free Republic, to a command and control state-run oligarchy controlled by offshore banking interests is explored at length in the documentary.

In order to make this the most hard-hitting documentary we have ever released, the biggest budget ever allocated to a single movie was made available, primarily for the purpose of traveling all over the country to conduct no less than 19 separate sit down interviews for the film.

Personalities who will appear in the movie include Gerald Celente, Alan Watt, Jesse Ventura, climatologist Tim Ball, economist John Perkins, the Oath Keepers, Dr. Sherry Tenpenny, Webster Tarpley, Bob Bowman, Wayne Madsen and George Humphrey.

Fall of the Republic is an unprecedented two hour romp through the highly concentrated and brazen levels of tyranny and corruption displayed by Obama and his administration in the short period since they took office.

The end of the movie is encapsulated by the idea that the fight to maintain and restore a free Republic is a constant struggle against those who harbor the virus of evil in their souls.

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The films compare the rise of the Neo-Conservative movement in the United States and the radical Islamist movement, making comparisons on their origins and claiming similarities between the two. More controversially, it argues that the threat of radical Islamism as a massive, sinister organised force of destruction, specifically in the form of al-Qaeda, is a myth perpetrated by politicians in many countries—and particularly American Neo-Conservatives—in an attempt to unite and inspire their people following the failure of earlier, more utopian ideologies.

The Power of Nightmares has been praised by film critics in both Britain and the United States. Its message and content have also been the subject of various critiques and criticisms from conservatives and progressives.

Part 1: “Baby It’s Cold Outside”

The first part of the series explains the origin of Islamism and Neo-Conservatism. It shows Egyptian civil servant Sayyid Qutb, depicted as the founder of modern Islamist thought, visiting the U.S. to learn about the education system, but becoming disgusted with what he saw as a corruption of morals and virtues in western society through individualism. When he returns to Egypt, he is disturbed by westernisation under Gamal Abdel Nasser and becomes convinced that in order to save society it must be completely restructured along the lines of Islamic law while still using western technology. He also becomes convinced that this can only be accomplished through the use of an elite “vanguard” to lead a revolution against the established order. Qutb becomes a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood and, after being tortured in one of Nasser’s jails, comes to believe that western-influenced leaders can justly be killed for the sake of removing their corruption. Qutb is executed in 1966, but he inspires the future mentor of Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, to start his own secret Islamist group. Inspired by the 1979 Iranian revolution, Zawahiri and his allies assassinate Egyptian president Anwar Al Sadat, in 1981, in hopes of starting their own revolution. The revolution does not materialise, and Zawahiri comes to believe that the majority of Muslims have been corrupted by their western-inspired leaders and thus may be legitimate targets of violence if they do not join him.

At the same time in the United States, a group of disillusioned liberals, including Irving Kristol and Paul Wolfowitz, look to the political thinking of Leo Strauss after the perceived failure of President Johnson’s “Great Society”. They come to the conclusion that the emphasis on individual liberty was the undoing of the plan. They envisioned restructuring America by uniting the American people against a common evil, and set about creating a mythical enemy. These factions, the Neo-Conservatives, came to power under the Reagan administration, with their allies Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, and work to unite the United States in fear of the Soviet Union. The Neo-Conservatives allege the Soviet Union is not following the terms of disarmament between the two countries, and, with the investigation of “Team B”, they accumulate a case to prove this with dubious evidence and methods. President Reagan is convinced nonetheless.

Part 2: “The Phantom Victory”

In the second episode, Islamist factions, rapidly falling under the more radical influence of Zawahiri and his rich Saudi acolyte Osama bin Laden, join the Neo-Conservative-influenced Reagan Administration to combat the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan. When the Soviets eventually pull out and when the Eastern Bloc begins to collapse in the late 1980s, both groups believe they are the primary architects of the “Evil Empire’s” defeat. Curtis argues that the Soviets were on their last legs anyway, and were doomed to collapse without intervention.

However, the Islamists see it quite differently, and in their triumph believe that they had the power to create ‘pure’ Islamic states in Egypt and Algeria. However, attempts to create perpetual Islamic states are blocked by force. The Islamists then try to create revolutions in Egypt and Algeria by the use of terrorism to scare the people into rising up. However, the people are terrified by the violence and the Algerian government uses their fear as a way to maintain power. In the end, the Islamists declare the entire populations of the countries as inherently contaminated by western values, and finally in Algeria turn on each other, each believing that other terrorist groups are not pure enough Muslims either.

In America, the Neo-Conservatives’ aspirations to use the United States military power for further destruction of evil are thrown off track by the ascent of George HW Bush to the presidency, followed by the 1992 election of Bill Clinton leaving them out of power. The Neo-Conservatives, with their conservative Christian allies, attempt to demonise Clinton throughout his presidency with various real and fabricated stories of corruption and immorality. To their disappointment, however, the American people do not turn against Clinton. The Islamist attempts at revolution end in massive bloodshed, leaving the Islamists without popular support. Zawahiri and bin Laden flee to the sufficiently safe Afghanistan and declare a new strategy; to fight Western-inspired moral decay they must deal a blow to its source: the United States.

Part 3: “The Shadows in the Cave”

The Neo-Conservatives use the September 11th attacks, with al-Fadl’s description of al-Qaeda, to launch the War on Terror.

The final episode addresses the actual rise of al-Qaeda. Curtis argues that, after their failed revolutions, bin Laden and Zawahiri had little or no popular support, let alone a serious complex organisation of terrorists, and were dependent upon independent operatives to carry out their new call for jihad. The film instead argues that in order to prosecute bin Laden in absentia for the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings, US prosecutors had to prove he was the head of a criminal organisation responsible for the bombings. They find a former associate of bin Laden, Jamal al-Fadl, and pay him to testify that bin Laden was the head of a massive terrorist organisation called “al-Qaeda”. With the September 11th attacks, Neo-Conservatives in the new Republican government of George W. Bush use this created concept of an organisation to justify another crusade against a new evil enemy, leading to the launch of the War on Terrorism.

After the American invasion of Afghanistan fails to uproot the alleged terrorist network, the Neo-Conservatives focus inwards, searching unsuccessfully for terrorist sleeper cells in America. They then extend the war on “terror” to a war against general perceived evils with the invasion of Iraq in 2003. The ideas and tactics also spread to the United Kingdom where Tony Blair uses the threat of terrorism to give him a new moral authority. The repercussions of the Neo-Conservative strategy are also explored with an investigation of indefinitely-detained terrorist suspects in Guantanamo Bay, many allegedly taken on the word of the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance without actual investigation on the part of the United States military, and other forms of “preemption” against non-existent and unlikely threats made simply on the grounds that the parties involved could later become a threat. Curtis also makes a specific attempt to allay fears of a dirty bomb attack, and concludes by reassuring viewers that politicians will eventually have to concede that some threats are exaggerated and others altogether devoid of reality.

More information about this documentary series on wikipedia.

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This film examines the many aspects of our Authoritative Systems that we take for granted in our everyday lives. From Currency Printing and The Origins of our Money, to How the Media Works and Compartmentalization of Information, this film connects the dots between seemingly unconnected dynamics of our System.

Find out who YOU really are, Legally and Lawfully -Discover the difference between the Sovereign Human and the Legal Person. Empower yourself with important sources of key information, from Books to other Mind-Blowing Documentaries that will change the way you look at the world, and inspire you to do something important that makes a difference!

If you are the type of person who likes to Ask Questions and Demand Answers from the people that Claim Power over you, then you’ll want to know what this film has to offer… Who really benefited from the 9/11 Attacks? What of the plight facing dying rescue workers who are now ill, lied to by the authorities, people once hailed as heroes now shunned as lunatics or unpatriotic? Could it be that this valuable information is kept from the public because it is simply too profitable to the controlling interest of people and companies who work so hard to hide, distort or obfuscate the truth?

How do we reach out and claim our rights again and truly make our political representatives Accountable? Hijacking Humanity will put you on the path to unlearn the lies you’ve been taught, learn the truth that’s been hidden, and contribute to the massive “paradigm shift” of humanity that will take back our planet from dark destructive forces that appear to be out of control.

Divergentfilms and CraigBrockie.com bring you a film that will make your jaw drop, make you laugh, make you cry, make you angry, and ignite the righteous fire within you.

Discover who’s trying to rule you from the shadows, how they are doing it, and find empowerment to take back your power and freedom today.

Chapter 1 – Do As We Say, Not As We Do

Video author’s comments:
The introduction to the series presents the main argument of the film, that a few people in positions of power can manipulate the masses, and analyzes exactly how and why they would do so.

Writer/Director Paul Verge relays his personal story about coming to terms with the grand deception of society’s System. His journey travelling across Canada and the United States reveals insights rarely heard in today’s mass media, because it is simply too profitable to keep this information secret. Edward Bernays is a central figurehead in the development of mass marketing techniques, and his role in history is examined in Chapter 1, as well as the techniques of Hegelian Dialectic, Compartmentalization of Information, and Secret Societies.

Chapter 2 – It’s a Rich Man’s World.. Government?

Video author’s comments:
An important part of The Cause of Effect : Hijacking Humanity, Chapter 2 of the series, titled, “It’s a Rich Man’s World.. Government?” presents evidence about the North American Union, as well as a brief history on Currency and the Banking Banksters who control our money today.

Writer/Director Paul Verge relays his personal story about coming to terms with the grand deception of society’s System. His journey travelling across Canada and the United States reveals insights rarely heard in today’s mass media, because it is simply too profitable to keep this information secret. The Banking cartels today seem to be trying to centralize their power to lead us towards a World Currency that has no intrinsic value, and will be controlled by a World Dictatorship.

In order to further this goal, a step at a time, the Banksters, with their IMF, World Bank and Federal Reserve System operating in conjunction with members of the Council on Foreign Relations, Trilateral Commission and Bilderberg Group are taking the United States into a financial nosedive, purposely, to devalue the currency, and thus introduce the Amero – A North American Currency for a North American Union.

Do you think Canada, the US and Mexico should have a HARM-onization of laws, rules and regulations?
Me neither.

Chapter 3 – Commerce & Law – Laws of Land & Water

Video author’s comments:
The most interesting and information laden chapter of The Cause of Effect : Hijacking Humanity, Chapter 3 of the series, titled simply, “Commerce & Law” presents an alternative take on how our Law System works, especially in relation to money, as well as examining the concepts of Law of the Land (Common Law) and Law of the Water (Admiralty Law) and which is used to govern us today.

Writer/Director Paul Verge relays his personal story about coming to terms with the grand deception of society’s System. His journey travelling across Canada and the United States reveals insights rarely heard in today’s mass media, because it is simply too profitable to keep this information secret. The legal system in its current state has existed for only a short time, but it is acting as a noose, slowly closing around our freedoms as we are fed the illusion that our fundamental human rights are evaporating. Learning your rights, the difference between a human and a Person (Legal Person vs. Natural Person), as well as the true origins and purpose of your Birth Certificate, Social Insurance/Social Security Number, and even what it really means to be an Employee, a Driver or a Taxpayer.

Most Politicians were usually Lawyers (Liars?), and thus, is it not possible that these Lawyer Politicians with their foreign Legalese Language could not form their words to create invisible yokes around the people that serve the very originators of these excessive laws, restrictions and taxes? Why do we pay an income tax? Could it be that our Legal Status as a Federal Citizen is legally defined as that of a Government Employee, all of whom ARE in fact liable for income tax?

Chapter 4 – 911 Conspiracy and Global Consolidation

Video author’s comments:
Divergentfilms and CraigBrockie.com bring you the 4th Chapter in the Cause of Effect series, “Hijacking Humanity Final Cut” Chapter 4 – 911 Conspiracy and The Push Towards Final Global Consolidation. The Elites are making their last big push to fulfill their 150+ years-old plan to dominate and enslave the human race under their System of Global Governance, ruling through Law, Commerce, Currency, and Media Manipulation. All of these aspects came together for the Trigger Event, which was the 911 Attacks. As we see different mechanisms of the Elitest Game come to fruition, we realize more and more that this new era’s rules are ultimately based on the Lie that is the Official Story of 911. Don’t believe us, research the truth for yourself, but remember, Cui Bono? Who benefactor of the attacks? Certainly no Muslim killed since the War of Terror has begun, has ever gained anything.

If a government wanted further repressive laws against the people, and further control over the people, then there is a strong argument that they would benefit greatly from those attacks, by being able to claim new powers necessary to “protect the people”. For other info on 9/11, please watch Loose Change Final Cut, 9/11 Mysteries, and many many others that cover a whole plethora of evidence that works to unravel the official story.

Chapter 5 – Hope, L.O.V.E. and Positive Change

Video author’s comments:
The conclusion to The Cause of Effect – Hijacking Humanity Final Cut, Chapter 5 closes the film, putting the previous information into actionable context, leaving the viewer empowered to act and further their research into the subject matter covered. You are encouraged to participate in Forums at The CauseOfEffect.com, and work with other like minded people to find Solutions for Humanity! Thank you for watching Hijacking Humanity Final Cut!

The director Robert Greenwald is the leading director of issue oriented documentary films, including Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price, Uncovered: The Whole Truth About The Iraq War, The Real McCain, and Iraq For Sale: The War Profiteers.

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This is part 1 of 2.

The documentary is split into segments as outlined below.

Part I: 9/11 THE UNTOLD STORY (38 min.) Half the world believes Muslims were responsible for 9/11. The other half believes Israeli Zionists were responsible. Who’s right?

Part II: HIDDEN EMPIRE (22 min.) The world’s most powerful empire is not the U.S.A. It is an empire that insiders call “Empire Of The City”.

Part III: TRAIL OF THE PHARAOHS (25 min.) Did the Biblical Abraham really live to be 175? Did Moses really turn staffs into snakes and rivers into blood?

Part IV: GOD AND THE QUEEN (30 min.) Genealogy charts show that British and French royalty are descendants of Mary Magdalene and Jesus Christ. Is it true?

Part V: ALL THE QUEEN’S MEN (22 min.) How rich and powerful is Queen Elizabeth II?

Part VI: THE GODFATHERS (30 min.) They scammed control of the Bank of England and the U.S. Federal Reserve, then they found GOD – Gold, Oil and Drugs.

Part VII: CHEATING AT MONOPOLY (52 min.) How many people would play a game of monopoly if the banker was cheating and fixing the rules? Over 6 billion.

Part VIII: ASSES OF EVIL (29 min.) The New World Order Mafia are invisible rulers who make puppets out of politicians, heroes out of villains and villains out of heroes.

Part IX: KING OF HEARTS (22 min.) The ultimate goal of “insiders” is to disarm the world and create one world empire under one world ruler. Who is he?

Part X: SOLUTIONS (28 min.) Protesting and writing letters to deaf politicians doesn’t work. What does work?

The city of London, the city of Vatican and the city of columbia are the 3 independant states within states wich composes the empire of the city. The first is financial control over earth economy, the second is religion control over the earth and the third one is military control over the earth. Together they make the very unholy trinity which forms the egyptian pyramid that we can see on the back of the privately owned federal reserve note that is used as american dollar to maintain the colony in debt and under the Queen. Many people realize that this mystifying situation, in which an alleged democratic and self-governing nation is actually controlled against the will of the people, is a clear indication that there must be a very powerful and well-financed occult organization which plans and directs world affairs, and for lack of a more specific identification thie suspected secret organization is popularly referred to as the International Financiers, Banksters cartel or “The Crown corporation”.

The Producer is an experienced, award winning documentary filmmaker who, as a child, learned that her father was a member of the secretive cult of Freemasonry. She recalls many arguments between her parents over her father’s secret meetings and the exclusion of women from the brotherhood. The Masonic ring that her father wore had been passed down from father to son over the generations. When she asked her father about the meaning of the letter “G” and the compass and square on his ring, she got no response. As an adult, she decided to investigate. That investigation grew into four years of intensive research into the identity and history of the diabolical globalists who she calls the “Ring Of Power”. Their goal is one World Empire and one world ruler.

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Episode 1. “Happiness Machines”

The story of the relationship between Sigmund Freud and his American nephew, Edward Bernays. Bernays invented the public relations profession in the 1920s and was the first person to take Freud’s ideas to manipulate the masses. He showed American corporations how they could make people want things they didn’t need by systematically linking mass-produced goods to their unconscious desires.

Bernays was one of the main architects of the modern techniques of mass-consumer persuasion, using every trick in the book, from celebrity endorsement and outrageous PR stunts, to eroticising the motorcar.

His most notorious coup was breaking the taboo on women smoking by persuading them that cigarettes were a symbol of independence and freedom. But Bernays was convinced that this was more than just a way of selling consumer goods. It was a new political idea of how to control the masses. By satisfying the inner irrational desires that his uncle had identified, people could be made happy and thus docile.

It was the start of the all-consuming self which has come to dominate today’s world.

Episode 2. “The Engineering of Consent”

The programme explores how those in power in post-war America used Freud’s ideas about the unconscious mind to try and control the masses.

Politicians and planners came to believe Freud’s underlying premise – that deep within all human beings were dangerous and irrational desires and fears. They were convinced that it was the unleashing of these instincts that had led to the barbarism of Nazi Germany. To stop it ever happening again they set out to find ways to control this hidden enemy within the human mind.

Sigmund Freud’s daughter, Anna, and his nephew, Edward Bernays, provided the centrepiece philosophy. The US government, big business, and the CIA used their ideas to develop techniques to manage and control the minds of the American people. But this was not a cynical exercise in manipulation. Those in power believed that the only way to make democracy work and create a stable society was to repress the savage barbarism that lurked just under the surface of normal American life.

Episode 3. “There is a Policeman Inside All Our Heads: He Must Be Destroyed”

In the 1960s, a radical group of psychotherapists challenged the influence of Freudian ideas in America. They were inspired by the ideas of Wilhelm Reich, a pupil of Freud’s, who had turned against him and was hated by the Freud family. He believed that the inner self did not need to be repressed and controlled. It should be encouraged to express itself.

Out of this came a political movement that sought to create new beings free of the psychological conformity that had been implanted in people’s minds by business and politics.

This programme shows how this rapidly developed in America through self-help movements like Werber Erhard’s Erhard Seminar Training – into the irresistible rise of the expressive self: the Me Generation.

But the American corporations soon realised that this new self was not a threat but their greatest opportunity. It was in their interest to encourage people to feel they were unique individuals and then sell them ways to express that individuality. To do this they turned to techniques developed by Freudian psychoanalysts to read the inner desires of the new self.

Episode 4. “Eight People Sipping Wine in Kettering”

This episode explains how politicians on the left, in both Britain and America, turned to the techniques developed by business to read and fulfil the inner desires of the self.

Both New Labour, under Tony Blair, and the Democrats, led by Bill Clinton, used the focus group, which had been invented by psychoanalysts, in order to regain power. They set out to mould their policies to people’s inner desires and feelings, just as capitalism had learnt to do with products.

Out of this grew a new culture of public relations and marketing in politics, business and journalism. One of its stars in Britain was Matthew Freud who followed in the footsteps of his relation, Edward Bernays, the inventor of public relations in the 1920s.

The politicians believed they were creating a new and better form of democracy, one that truly responded to the inner feelings of individual. But what they didn’t realise was that the aim of those who had originally created these techniques had not been to liberate the people but to develop a new way of controlling them.

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The series consists of three one-hour programmes which explore the concept and definition of freedom, specifically, “how a simplistic model of human beings as self-seeking, almost robotic, creatures led to today’s idea of freedom.

Episode 3. “We Will Force You To Be Free”

The final programme focussed on the concepts of positive and negative liberty introduced in the 1950s by Isaiah Berlin. Curtis briefly explained how negative liberty could be defined as freedom from coercion and positive liberty as the opportunity to strive to fulfill one’s potential. Tony Blair had read Berlin’s essays on the topic and wrote to him in the late 1990s, arguing that positive and negative liberty could be mutually compatible. He never received a reply, as Berlin was on his death bed.

The programme began with a description of the Two Concepts of Liberty, reviewing Berlin’s opinion that, since it lacked coercion, negative liberty was the ‘safer’ of the two. Curtis then explained how many political groups who sought their vision of freedom ended up using violence to achieve it.

For example the French revolutionaries wished to overthrow a monarchical system which they viewed as antithetical to freedom, but in so doing ended up with the Reign of Terror. Similarly, the Bolshevik revolutionaries in Russia, who sought to overthrow the old order and replace it with a society in which everyone was equal, ended up creating a totalitarian regime which used violence to achieve its ends.

Using violence, not simply as a means to achieve one’s goals, but also as an expression of freedom from Western bourgeois norms, was an idea developed by African revolutionary Frantz Fanon. He developed it from the Existentialist ideology of Jean-Paul Sartre, who argued that terrorism was a “terrible weapon but the oppressed poor have no others.” These views were expressed, for example, in the revolutionary film The Battle of Algiers.

This programme also explored how economic freedom had been used in Russia and the problems this had introduced. A set of policies known as “shock therapy” were brought in mainly by outsiders, which had the effect of destroying the social safety net that existed in most other western nations and Russia. In the latter, the sudden removal of e.g. the subsidies for basic goods caused their prices to rise enormously, making them hardly affordable for ordinary people. An economic crisis escalated during the 1990s and some people were paid in goods rather than money. Yeltsin was accused by his parliamentary deputies of “economic genocide”, due to the large numbers of people now too poor to eat. Yeltsin responded to this by removing parliament’s power and becoming increasingly autocratic. At the same time, many formerly state-owned industries were sold to private businesses, often at a fraction of their real value. Ordinary people, often in financial difficulties, would sell shares, which to them were worthless, for cash, without appreciating their true value. This ended up with the rise of the Oligarchs—super-rich businessmen who attributed their rise to the sell offs of the ’90s. It resulted in a polarisation of society into the poor and ultra-rich, and indirectly led to a more autocratic style of government under Vladimir Putin, which, while less free, promised to provide people with dignity and basic living requirements.

There was a similar review of post-war Iraq, in which an even more extreme “shock therapy” was employed—the removal from government of all Ba’ath party employees and the introduction of economic models which followed the simplified economic model of human beings outlined in the first two programmes—this had the result of immediately disintegrating Iraqi society and the rise of two strongly autocratic insurgencies, one based on Sunni-Ba’athist ideals and another based on revolutionary Shi’a philosophies.

Curtis also looked at the neo-conservative agenda of the 1980s. Like Sartre, they argued that violence would sometimes be necessary to achieve their goals, except they wished to spread what they described as democracy. Curtis quoted General Alexander Haig then US Secretary of State, as saying that “some things were worth fighting for”. However, Curtis argued, although the version of society espoused by the neo-conservatives made some concessions towards freedom, it did not offer true freedom. The neo-conservatives were ardent supporters of the Augusto Pinochet regime in Chile which used violence to crush opponents in a virtual police state.

The neo-conservatives also took a strong line against the Sandinistas—a political group in Nicaragua—who Reagan argued were accepting help from the Soviets and posed a real threat to American security. The truth was that the Sandinistas posed no real military threat to the US, and a disinformation campaign was started against them painting them as accessories of the Soviets. The Contras, who were a proxy army fighting against the Sandinistas, were—according to US propaganda—valiantly fighting against the evil of Communism. In reality, argued Curtis, they were using all manner of techniques, including the torture, rape and murder of civilians. The CIA funded the Contras by allegedly flying in cocaine into the United States, as financing the Contras directly would have been illegal.

However such policies did not always result in the achievement of neo-conservative aims and occasionally threw up genuine surprises. Curtis examined the Western-backed government of the Shah in Iran, and how the mixing of Sartre’s positive libertarian ideals with Shia religious philosophy led to the revolution which overthrew it. Having previously been a meek philosophy of acceptance of the social order, in the minds of revolutionaries such as Ali Shariati and Ayatollah Khomeini, Revolutionary Shia Islam became a meaningful force to overthrow tyranny.

The programme reviewed the Blair government and its role in achieving its vision of a stable society. In fact, argued Curtis, the Blair government had created the opposite of freedom, in that the type of liberty it had engendered wholly lacked any kind of meaning. Its military intervention in Iraq had provoked terrorist actions in the UK and these terrorist actions were in turn used to justify restrictions of liberty.

In essence, the programme suggested that following the path of negative liberty to its logical conclusions, as governments have done in the West for the past 50 years, resulted in a society without meaning populated only by selfish automatons, and that there was some value in positive liberty in that it allowed people to strive to better themselves.

The closing minutes directly state that if western humans were ever to find their way out of the “trap” described in the series, they would have to realise that Isaiah Berlin was wrong and that not all attempts at creating positive liberty necessarily ended in coercion and tyranny.

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The series consists of three one-hour programmes which explore the concept and definition of freedom, specifically, “how a simplistic model of human beings as self-seeking, almost robotic, creatures led to today’s idea of freedom.

Episode 2. “The Lonely Robot”

The second episode reiterated many of the ideas of the first, but developed the theme that drugs such as Prozac and lists of psychological symptoms which might indicate anxiety or depression were being used to normalise behaviour and make humans behave more predictably, like machines.

This was not presented as a conspiracy theory, but as a logical (although unpredicted) outcome of market-driven self-diagnosis by checklist based on symptoms, but not actual causes, discussed in the previous programme.

People with standard mood fluctuations diagnosed themselves as abnormal. They then presented themselves at psychiatrist’s offices, fulfilled the diagnostic criteria without offering personal histories, and were medicated. The alleged result was that vast numbers of Western people have had their behaviour and mentation modified by SSRI drugs without any strict medical necessity.

The Ax Fight—a famous anthropological study of the Yanomamo people of Venezuela by Tim Asch and Napoleon Chagnon—was re-examined and its strictly genetic-determinist interpretation called into question. Other researchers were called upon to verify Chagnon’s conclusions and arrived at totally opposed opinions. The suggestion was raised that the presence of a film crew and the handing out of machetes to some, but not all, tribesmen might have caused them to ‘perform’ as they did. While being questioned by Curtis, Chagnon was so annoyed by this suggestion that he terminated the interview and walked out of shot, protesting under his breath.

Film of Richard Dawkins propounding his ultra-strict “selfish gene” analogy of life was shown, with the archive clips spanning two decades to emphasise how the severely reductionist ideas of programmed behaviour have been absorbed by mainstream culture. (Later, however, the documentary gives evidence that cells are able to selectively replicate parts of DNA dependent on current needs. According to Curtis such evidence detracts from the simplified economic models of human beings.). This brought Curtis back to the economic models of Hayek and the game theories of Cold War. Curtis explains how, with the “robotic” description of humankind apparently validated by geneticists, the game theory systems gained even more hold over society’s engineers.

The programme describes how the Clinton administration gave in to market theorists in the US and how New Labour in the UK decided to measure everything it could, the better to improve it, introducing such artificial and unmeasurable targets as:

Reduction of hunger in Sub-Saharan Africa by 48%
Reduction of global conflict by 6%

It also introduced a rural community vibrancy index in order to gauge the quality of life in British villages and a birdsong index to check the apparent decline of wildlife.

In industry and the public services, this way of thinking led to a plethora of targets, quotas, and plans. It was meant to set workers free to achieve these targets in any way they chose. What these game-theory schemes did not predict was that the players, faced with impossible demands, would cheat.

Curtis describes how, in order to meet artificially inflated targets:

Lothian and Borders Police reclassified dozens of criminal offences as “suspicious occurrences”, in order to keep them out of crime figures.

Some NHS Hospital Trusts created an unofficial post of “The Hello Nurse,” whose sole task it was to greet new arrivals in order to claim for statistical purposes that the patient had been “seen,” even though no treatment or even examination had occurred during the encounter.

NHS managers took the wheels off trolleys and reclassified them as beds, while simultaneously reclassifying corridors as wards, in order to falsify Accident & Emergency waiting times statistics.

In a section called “The Death of Social Mobility”, Curtis also describes how the theory of the free market was applied to education. With league tables of school performance published, the richest parents moved house to get their children into better schools. This caused house prices in the appropriate catchment areas to rise dramatically—thus excluding poorer parents who were left with the worst-performing schools. This is just one aspect of a more rigidly stratified society, which Curtis identifies in the way in which the incomes of the poorest (working class) Americans have actually fallen in real terms since the 1970s, while the incomes of the average (middle class) have increased slightly and those of the highest earners (upper class) have quadrupled. Similarly, babies in poorer areas in the UK are twice as likely to die in their first year as children from prosperous areas.

Curtis’s narration concludes with the observation that the game theory/free market model is now undergoing interrogation by economists who suspect a more irrational model of behaviour is appropriate and useful. In fact, in formal experiments the only people who behaved exactly according to the mathematical models created by game theory are economists themselves, and psychopaths.

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