Adam Curtis: the new politics

[madd0ct0r]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcy8uLjRHPM

posted without comment.

[Grumman]

posted without comment.

If it's worth posting here, it's worth telling us why we should watch it.

[Death Zebra]

I don't know whether the video is serious but it's pretty funny regardless. It suggests that a new kind of politics is being employed wherein the news is deliberately designed to cause a defeatist response and be so bewildering, by putting out conflicting ideas, that no coherent opposition can be formed. It uses Russia as an example and that this might also be going on in the UK.

My explanantion isn't good but it's probably worth watching especially as it's only 5 minutes and 9 seconds long.

[madd0ct0r]

fair point, I didn't want to influence the discussion (and also forgot to embed it, which would have provided a lot more information)

It's a 5 minute long video. I've posted the transcript below.

So much of the news this year has been hopeless, depressing and above all confusing, to which the only response is 'Oh Dear'. But what this film is going to suggest is that defeatist response has become a central part of a new system of political control and to understand how this is happening you have to look to Russia and to a man called Vladislav Surkov who is a hero of our time.

Surkov is one of President Putin's advisors and has helped him maintain his power for fifteen years, but he has done it in a very new way. He came originally from the avant-garde art world and those who have studied his career say that what Surkov has done is import ideas from conceptual art into the very heart of politics. His aim is to undermine peoples perception of the world so they never know what is really happening. Surkov turned Russian politics into a bewildering constantly changing piece of theatre, he sponsored all kinds of groups, from Neo-Nazi skin-heads to liberal human rights groups, he even backed parties that were opposed to President Putin, but the key thing was that Surkov then let it be known that this was what he was doing which meant that no one was sure what was real or fake. As one journalist put it 'Its a strategy of power that keeps any opposition constantly confused, a ceaseless shape-shifting that is unstoppable because its indefinable.'

Which is exactly what Surkov is alleged to have done in the Ukraine this year. In typical fashion as the war began Surkov published a short story about something he Non-Linear War, war where you never know what the enemy are really up to or even who they are. The underlying aim Surkov says is not to win the war but to use the conflict to create a constant state of destabilized perception in order to manage and control. But maybe we have something similar emerging here in Britain, everything were told by journalists and politicians is confusing and contradictory, of course there is no Mr Surkov in charge but its an odd non-linear world that plays into the hands of those in power. British troops have come home from Afghanistan but nobody seems to know whether it was a victory or whether it was a defeat. Aging disk-jockeys are prosecuted for crimes they committed decades ago, while practically no one in the city of London is prosecuted for the endless financial crimes that are being revealed there. In Syria we are told that President Assad is the evil enemy, but then his enemies turn out to be even more evil than him, so we bomb them and by doing that we help keep Assad in power. But the real epicenter of this non-linear world is the economy and the closest we have to our own shape-shifting post-modern politician is George Osbourne.

He tells us proudly that the economy is growing but at the same time wages are going down, he says he is cutting the deficit but then its revealed that the deficit is going up. But the dark heart of this shape-shifting world is quantitative-easing, the government is insisting on taking billions of pounds out of the economy through its austerity program, yet at the very same time it is pumping billions of pounds in to the economy through quantitative-easing, the equivalent of £24,000 for every family in Britain. But it gets even more confusing because the Bank of England have admitted that those billions of pounds have not gone where they have suppose to, a vast amount of the money has actually
found its way in to the hands of the wealthiest 5% in Britain, it has been described as the biggest transfer of wealth to the rich in recent documented history. It could be a huge scandal comparable to the greedy oligarchs in Russia. A ruthless elite siphoning off billions of public money. But nobody seems to know.

It sums up the strange mood of our time where nothing really makes any coherent sense. We live with a constant vaudeville of contradictory stories that makes it impossible for any real opposition to emerge, because they can't counter it with a coherent narrative of their own and it means that we as individuals become ever more powerless, unable to challenge anything because we live in a state of confusion and uncertainty. To which the response is 'Oh Dear' But that's what they want you to say.

My thoughts:
It's a valuable short film, I'm not sure the idea is that new (Orwell certainly included it) but I'm not aware of designing a low rumble of chaotic responses in order to prevent a coherent opposition forming actually being used in modern times. It's an interesting mirror of the chaotic opposition approaches appearing - Occupy, Anonymous. Such groups flow around concentrated opposition to them (like bees around a hammer), while a chaotic miasma approach saps the resolve of individual agents and makes them paranoid of each other.

[Simon_Jester]

Most of what he describes in Britain is a straightforward case of the current Government having no intellectual integrity and blatantly lying, while the British financial sector takes advantage of a weak regulatory regime to enrich itself through corruption.

That's not 'new' in any meaningful sense of the word. It's pigs oinking at the trough.
_________________________

The Russian situation is more interesting and complicated. Assuming that the description of Surkov is accurate (which I couldn't possibly prove), this involves a more flexible use of the old playbook. Using agent-provocateurs to create doubt among the opposition about whether any given person opposing the regime is "real" or "fake" is of course a well-known tactic, usually drawn from secret police handbooks.

Part of the issue behind this might be that superficially, at least to me...

I think Putin has secured himself in power in Russia by honoring a very specific sort of 'social contract' with the Russian people. Under this, all Putin has to do is:

1) Prevent the level of corruption from the oligarchs from reaching the grossly dysfunctional depths of the '90s, so that crime is more or less manageable, workers have a reasonable assurance of actually getting paid, and some semblance of normal economic life can occur.
2) Prevent Russia from exhibiting such weakness in foreign affairs that it is systematically humiliated in developments that take place on its very border. Which, again, is roughly what happened in the '90s.

[Grumman]

Part of Curtis's argument is something I've said myself: that politicians lie not just to convince others that they are right, but to create enough doubt to blunt opposition to their wrongdoing. Consider it their own form of a subprime mortgage: a politician can get a lot more out of their lie if they ride it almost to the point of failure instead of playing it safe and only abusing overengineered lies that will hold off more criticism than is actually needed to let them have their way.

The other part - that they are salting the media with unrelated lies to create an environment of general confusion rather than confusion about themselves specifically - I'm not so sure about. Sensationalist journalism can create much the same effect on its own, by looking for unique ("exclusive") news to attract viewers without doing its due diligence to ensure it is accurate.

[madd0ct0r]

Minor update: Adam Curtiss's full film on the topic has come out and is available for free (to brits or anyone with a proxy ect) here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p0 ... itter-lake