What
Happened to Our Dream of Freedom
Adam Curtis (BBC) - Part 3 - We Will Force You to be Free
Curtis is best known for his 2004 series The
Power of Nightmares: The Rise Of The Politics of Fear. This
detailed how neocons in the US talked up the threat of radical
Islamism to justify their "war on terror".
"We Will Force You To Be
Free" Broadcast 25 March, 2007
The final program focused 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 deathbed.
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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 so-called Reign of Terror.
Similarly, the Communist 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 Franz
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." (^ Sartre: The
Philosopher of the Twentieth Century, Bernard-Henri Lévy,
p.343). ) 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. 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 off to private businesses, often at a
fraction of their real cost. Ordinary people 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 and 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
hinted that instead of seeking either positive liberty, with its
coercive undertones leading to tyranny, or negative liberty,
with its selfish undertones leading to meaninglessness, a
balance could perhaps be achieved, or that positive liberty
could in fact be employed in our societies without resulting in
violence and coercion.
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