Adam Curtis - Oh Dearism II & Non-Linear War (2014)

A look back on the news events from 2014 reveals a confusing, muddled mess. Things are increasingly chaotic, along with the reporting of the events in the culture of 24-7 rolling news, sound-byte feeds and the Internet. The result, as we see, is not a coherent public understanding of these complex events, but more a profound mass-confusion, with discourse destroyed, which in-turn broods disengagement from the world and further atomizes an already divided-and-conquered public. It is this response that is a powerful form of social control, and is by design…
https://thoughtmaybe.com/oh-dearism-2/

Transcript

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 people’s 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 'It’s 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 called Non-Linear War.
A 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 it’s 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 supposed 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.