This is my post of the 3rd part of the documentary, “Nightmares,” which the CBC broadcast on Tuesday night. I also posted comments on the Sunday broadcast of Part I (and here) and Monday’s Part II. I also posted comments connecting this documentary to broader trends among contemporary ideologies.

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The bulk of the show punches holes in the view that al-Qaeda is a unitary organization with bin Laden at its head, which picks up on the theme of Part II.

It also parodies the paranoia in the US and UK over Al-Qaeda’s threat. I pointed out in my analysis of Part II how and why Al-Qaeda’s power has been overrated. Jason Burke, whom the documentary interviews, has been pointing this out in a series of books and articles over the past few years (see here and here). It also reveals the incompetency of various police organizations who’ve investigated and charged numerous individuals who’ve ended up being found innocent.

Fair enough.

However, it’s one thing to claim that Al-Qaeda’s threat is overrated but quite another thing to claim it is nonexistent. Moreover, the documentary fails to identify what groups constitute actual threats. The overall effect is that the documentary lulls viewers into thinking that all reported threats are simply “myths” created by the neocon cabal, which is highly irresponsible.

At one point the narrator claims that such simplistic “myths” are related to the power the media has in modern society to manipulate the masses. Is this the same media that produces “Nightmares” with its own simplistic vision of reality?

The narrator claims that postmodern societies now conduct themselves according to the “precautionary principle.” This means that they imagine threats and act decisively on them before those threats can materialize, and on the slenderest of evidence. Thomas Hobbes calls this diffidence, which is one of the 3 causes of war. This should make us skeptical that the “precautionary principle” is something new.

The narrator suggests that neoconservatives have been able to act according to this principle because it was pioneered and legimated by environmentalists all the way back in the 1970s. For the past 30 years, environmentalists have claimed the world will end in environmental catastophe unless precautionary measures, based on the slenderest of evidence, are taken. One need only consider the politics of the Kyoto Accord to see evidence of this.

An interesting suggestion, but hard to prove the connection with environmentalists, since the “precautionary principle” has been around for a very long time.

I think a better immediate reason is the fact that leaders like Bush and Blair simply had no clue of the threat Western democracies faced after 9/11. Recall the weeks after 9/11: fears of additional airplane attacks, anthrax attacks (no one’s been caught for those), etc. With the 9/11 Commission Report, we’ve come to learn just how ignorant Western intelligence agencies were of al-Qaeda or whatever you want to call the groups associated with bin Laden and radical Islamism. The 9/11 Commission Report was published after this documentary was produced, even though its contents, especially reports on intelligence gaps, were circulating long before the commission published its findings. The documentary interviews several former CIA people, who very likely had political axes to grind against the administration, though we don’t know what role these individuals played in producing the inept culture in the CIA and FBI that led to such intelligence breakdowns.

Lacking knowledge, it makes certain sense for leaders to overreact because failing to act could leave the door open for a catastrophic attack like 9/11. This is what Hobbes called “diffidence.” It is not necessarily a prudent strategy, but it has rationale.

Finally, a word on the basic premise of this documentary.

The narrator explains that the Bush administration’s “war on terrorism” is part of a postmodern rejection of idealism in favor of a politics of fear:

“Instead of delivering dreams, politicians now promise to protect us from nightmares.�

A society that believes in nothing, says one of the scholars interviewed, will base its politics on fear. It follows that terrorism is the worst nightmare. Nihilistic liberal democracies find their counterpart in apocalyptic Islamists.

The documentary implicitly draws on an “end of ideology” or “end of history” narrative where moral ideals and ideologies no longer play a part of framing political debate. Instead, postmodern cynicism expressed through the politics of fear is the new mode. In essence, it borrows from Francis Fukuyama’s claim that nihilistic boredom will characterize politics at the end of history (ironically, Fukuyama is one of the neocons mentioned in the documentary). Having nothing better to aim for, elites in liberal democracies will play cynical war games for the fun of it. Their subjects, still not evolved to the stage of postmodernism, will dumbly follow along along the lines the documentary suggests.

What the documentary’s premise overlooks is that ideological leaders (or those who provide a “vision”) have played the politics of fear as well. One thinks of the central role that fear plays in Thomas Hobbes’s political thought. Consider the fear of enemies of state that tyrants like Stalin and Hitler used. Moreover, fear has placed a central role for “ideology” since the term first entered political existence during the Napoleanic era. Fear is all ideologues ever delivered - both in practice and in the supposed logic of their visions. For details, see my post on ideologies (linked above).

Alexandr Solzehnitsyn observed of Soviet totalitarianism, and Hannah Arendt observed of Nazi totalitarianism, that its official histories were always getting rewritten. Partly for reasons of propaganda: people without memory are easily manipulated. And partly out of a historicist view of the world where things that mean something one day will mean another thing a week later.

A dozen or so years ago, a conservative, referring to Solzhenitsyn, told me that he thought within ten years leftists would claim that the Cold War never occurred. At the time I thought his comment was over the top.

With this documentary, I conclude that he had only underestimated how long it would take for them to revise history.

The CBC welcomes your comments about the show.