(7.12.2005) Blicken wir in einen Spiegel, dann halten wir das Bild, das uns daraus entgegensieht, für akkurat. Aber bewegt man sich nur einen Millimeter, verändert sich das Bild. Wir sehen im Grunde eine endlose Reihe von Spiegelungen. Aber manchmal muss ein Schriftsteller den Spiegel zerschlagen – denn von der anderen Seite dieses Spiegels blickt uns die Wahrheit ins Auge.

Ich glaube, dass den existierenden, kolossalen Widrigkeiten zum Trotz die unerschrockene, unbeirrbare, heftige intellektuelle Entschlossenheit, als Bürger die wirkliche Wahrheit unseres Lebens und unserer Gesellschaften zu bestimmen, eine ausschlaggebende Verpflichtung darstellt, die uns allen zufällt. Sie ist in der Tat zwingend notwendig.

Wenn sich diese Entschlossenheit nicht in unserer politischen Vision verkörpert, bleiben wir bar jeder Hoffnung, das wiederherzustellen, was wir schon fast verloren haben – die Würde des Menschen.

Published on Dec 12, 2016
The cult documentary maker explores the falsity of modern life in his own inimitable style. Though he’s spent the best part of four decades making television, Curtis’s signature blend of hypnotic archive footage, authoritative voiceover and a seemingly inexhaustible appetite for bizarre historical tangents is better suited to the web, a place just as resistant to the narrative handholding of broadcast TV as he is. He argues that an army of technocrats, complacent radicals and Faustian internet entrepreneurs have conspired to create an unreal world; one whose familiar and often comforting details blind us to its total inauthenticity.

(9.10.2016) The film is the most ambitious statement of Curtis’s methods and his message since his 2004 series The Power of Nightmares, which prophetically examined the ways that western governments exploit fears of terrorism to exert control. It is based on the premise that as a culture, perhaps as a species, “we have become lost in a fake world and cannot see the reality outside”.

No one talks about power these days. We are encouraged to see ourselves as free, independent individuals not controlled by anybody, and we despise politicians as corrupt and empty of all ideas.

But power is all around us. It‘s just that it has shifted and mutated into a massive system of management and control, whose tentacles reach into all parts of our lives. But we can‘t see it because we still think of power in the old terms—of politicians telling us what to do.

The aim of the film I have made—HyperNormalisation—is to bring that new power into focus, and show its true dimensions. It ranges from a giant computer high up in the mountains of northeast America that manages and controls over 7 percent of the worlds total wealth, to the complex algorithms that constantly monitor every move and choice you make online, to modern scientific ideas about what the normal human being should be—in their weight and in their feelings and moods.

The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear is a BBC television documentary series by Adam Curtis.

Part 3. ‚The Shadows in the Cave‘
The neoconservatives use the September 11 attacks, with al-Fadl‘s description of al-Qaeda, to launch the War on Terror.