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al-Qaeda Doesn't Exist- Film at 11

You’ll be hearing a lot more about this in the coming weeks and months, but the Village Voice this week tells us about a film that, on the controversy scale, is likely to make “Fahrenheit 9/11” look like “Pooh’s Huffalump Movie.”

Directed by Brit Adam Curtis and originally broadcast on the BBC, the film is called “The Power of Nightmares,” and purports to describe the dual phenomena of “two groups”- the American neoconservative movement, and radical Islamists. I’m not certain that the film is aiming to draw a moral equivalence between the two groups (Curtis denies this), but in the way the two are juxtaposed in the Voice piece, written by Curtis himself, I’m for some reason given that impression.

Some other impressions I’m getting, based on the piece (I haven’t seen the film): Curtis doesn’t know what he’s talking about. He asks, absurdly, “does al-Qaeda exist?" He claims al-Qaeda “had no formal organization”- of course they did. He completely misunderstands what neoconservatism is and has been throughout its history- using a perverted interpretation of Leo Strauss to describe the significantly different views of today’s neocons. David Brooks once said that “if the word 'neocon' appears in a sentence, there's a 90 percent chance that everything else in that sentence is untrue.” Curtis couldn’t have proved him more right.

But worst of all is Curtis’ failure to grasp the big difference between the two philosophies: the ultimate goal of the neocons is the full democratization and free-marketization of the world; the ultimate goal of the radical Islamists is fascism, totalitarianism, and worldwide subjugation.

In the piece Curtis also draws on the work of the mid-20th century Islamist philosopher Sayyid Qutb. Paul Berman, in writing “Terror and Liberalism”- unquestionably the most important book written about foreign policy and political philosophy since 9/11- did the same, but reached a very different conclusion: that radical Islam is not something to be understood, but rather an evil, totalitarian, and utterly illiberal menace that must be defeated. And liberals, of which Berman is one, should be leading the charge.

Curtis is presumably a man of the left, but in arguing that the efforts of Perle, Wolfowitz, et. al are “a simplified fantasy of the Islamist threat,” he shows he’s not half the liberal Paul Berman is.

A final prediction: if this film is ever released in the States, the “sophisticated” indie film audience will LOVE it- after all, their “American self-hatred” (as Armond White astutely called it) is such that they enthusiastically cheered the pro-al-Jazeera documentary “Control Room” last summer. Expect a preview, when the film is shown next week at the Tribeca Film Festival.

Posted by Stephen Silver at April 21, 2005 01:11 AM