How People Stay In Power

THE POWER OF NIGHTMARES

How politicians use fear to legitimize expansion of power
Analysis by G. Edward Griffin, 2007 May 4
You are about to see a series of documentary programs first broadcast over BBC on January 18, 2005. It contained information considered to be politically incorrect inside the United States, which is to say that it was never broadcast there. It is a scathing look at how U.S. and British political leaders have relied on nightmarish visions of external enemies to legitimize their expansion of power.
There are good and not-so-good elements in this series. Let’s start with the not-so-good. The writers have an obvious blind spot to the totalitarian and aggressive nature of the Soviet empire. It is true that, during the Cold War, Western leaders maximized and occasionally exaggerated the threat of Communism to enhance their own image of being white knights in a moral crusade against the forces of evil, and this series illustrates that point very well. However, it is not true that the Soviet threat was entirely fabricated for that purpose. It was very real and, I must add, continues to be real today under the deceptive guise of social democracy. Leninism continues to be a formidable global force. In this series, however, you will be assured that Communism was never a real threat to the West and that, today, it is entirely dead.
In a similar vein, the writers present former Soviet leaders, such as Mikhail Gorbachev, as wise and high-minded statesmen struggling against the cunning, war-mongering leaders of the Western World. This bias must not be ignored, because it reveals that the producers of this series are far from objective and are, in fact, apologists for Leninist regimes.
Bias to the Left shows up again in the depiction of political figures within the United States. We are told that President Clinton was innocent of all the charges against him for sexual harassment, the Whitewater scandal, protecting drug smuggling operations in Mena, Arkansas, and complicity in the murder of Vince Foster. All of these allegations, we are told, were the work of Right-Wing character assassins.
It gets even more bizarre. The program portrays Henry Kissinger and George Bush, Sr., as “liberals” working to bring peace to the world but gradually losing ground to the Neocons who seek war and power. There in no mention of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Rockefeller connection, the New World Order, or the underlying ideology of collectivism that drives both the Leninists and the Neocons.
As a final straw, the series uncritically accepts and perpetuates the Neocon version of 9/11, that it was engineered entirely by a small band of terrorists with no outside assistance.
Having said all this, you probably are wondering why I would recommend anyone taking the time to watch these programs. The answer is that, even though they are seriously flawed and biased, there is much truth in the mix. Over the years I have found a great deal of valuable information from sources that were biased. For example, when researching the history of the German cartel called I.G. Farben, which was the origin of the modern pharmaceutical industry, I found the greatest wealth of information from authors who were ideologically aligned with the Soviets. They were motivated to expose the nefarious deeds of German industry under the Nazis. If they had not done the research, it is possible that the sanitized German version would have been the only surviving historical record.
The danger in this is that one may fall prey to propaganda, so it is important to take everything with a grain of salt and withhold judgment until facts can be double checked and confirmed from multiple sources, especially those that are from an opposite perspective.