Review of the Power of Nightmares: Part II

The second section of the series “The Power of Nightmares” investigates the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union and those parties involved in the grueling battle in Afghanistan who believed that they had finally ousted the Soviets and were in turn fully responsible for the victory. The radical Islamists who had come from all across the Middle East, urged by their religious leaders, had begun to form a powerful group who believed their mission was to enlighten the people of the Middle East of their religious ideals and warn them of the pitfalls of consumption and of the dangers of lack of belief in all teachings of the Quran. The film puts forth the interesting idea that the “defeat” of the Soviet Union was never really a victory for anyone because truly the Soviet Union crumbled under its own societal pressures, it was a society rotting away from the inside out and it never really needed anyone to defeat it because it eventually proved to be capable of that itself…

The idea that both the Islamists and the neoconservatives held that they had defeated evil led each party in very different directions, both bursting with confidence and in search of their next venture. The Islamists decided that they needed to continue to spread their religious ideals and continued to develop the idea that if Muslims were not following the Quran then they were subject to murder and they continued the religious war across Algeria, Egypt, and many other countries and they had zero success in toppling the regimes like they had planned, this led to a lot of confusion and anger amongst members.

Meanwhile, in America the neoconservatives were having a but if a rough time coming up with their new target for a mission of good v. evil and they began working on building myths within their own infrastructure itself in order to impose some control on the people. This venture mostly manifested itself in religiousness, the pressing ideals of getting rid of multiculturalism, homosexuality, and women’s rights to their bodies, these were all platforms of Bush Sr.’s campaign for re-election. At first this seemed to be spreading about but people quickly realized that it was too harsh and peoples support seemed to wane and shift toward another candidate, Bill Clinton. People seemed to support Clinton because he was the antithesis of the Bush administration and people supported a serious change. During Clinton’s presidency the neoconservatives, especially Paul Wolfowitz, worked tirelessly to bash and malign the administration until it crumbled. As we all remember, the crumbling happened when the Lewinski scandal broke and neoconservatives began to push for impeachment. They finally had the details they needed to crush the liberal agenda once again. In turn, the second part of the film concludes with bin Laden and Zawahiri’s beginning plans for the attack on the source of all their problems, America.

While I have enjoyed watching both sections of this series so far I think that it is odd how much they leave out regarding finances and financial benefits to be had by choices made by both parties. I believe that the series is lacking some sort of real motive other than just the fact that neoconservatives wanted to rebuild and rebrand America as a source of “good” in a battle of “good v. evil”. I think that the deep historical account for how we ended up where we are is great and it definitely provides some background on many key players in history that I did not know much about and that in itself it great but I feel as though the whole story is not quite there however, maybe it will be summed up in the final chapter…

Here is a funny video of a Dana Carvey stand-up show that I saw years ago--I couldn't find the clip where he talks about "evil-doers" but this is almost as good!