Hate Hits the Wall

In sports -- particularly those that involve running -- there's a phrase for when a competitor begins to lose energy and momentum. They call it hitting the wall.

In BBC documentary film maker Louis Theroux's Most Hated Family in America in Crisis, Theroux returns to Topeka, Kansas to catch up with the Westboro Baptist Church.

What emerges is a portrait of a social movement -- and a family -- in crisis.

Maybe it's charitable to describe the WBC as a social movement. Perhaps its more fitting to describe them as part of a hate-based religion movement that includes individuals such as Florida's Pastor Terry Jones and the Taliban. The hate-based religion movement is basically a multi-faith hate cult.



In the four years since Theroux was last with the WBC, it has slowly hemhorraged followers. As it does this, the Phelps family itself hemhorrages family members.

It's against this backdrop that it's startling to see Shirley Phelps-Roeper so enthusiastic about the state of her church when it's in fact more troubled than its ever been before.



It's almost as if Shirley Phelps-Roeper has always been emotionally thriving off the hatred she provokes. With the WBC attracting more and more hatred, Phelps-Roeper seems more and more pleased with herself.

In fact, Phelps-Roeper seems more disturbed than ever before. Presenting some pint-sized hate placards, she describes them as "cute".

She even describes President Barack Obama as "the anti-Christ".



Even more shocking than the kid-sized signs she shows off is hearing the Phelps' own very young children -- some seeming to be as young as seven years old -- spouting the same hate rhetoric. This is just a form of victimization by the elder members of the hate-cult. The children have no idea what they're saying; they don't actually understand the hate they're being taught.



Most striking is that the WBC's hate-based religion makes victims of the Phelps children. They are essentially not allowed to be children. While the elder Phelps have allowed themselves to make friends, find love (even if it's with despicable people) and have families. They do not allow their children the same opportunities to live.

It repeatedly becomes thematic throughout the film: the hypocrisy of the WBC is slowly driving its children away.

At the end of the day, however, Louis Theroux should accept that his quest to understand the Phelps and the Westboro Baptist Church is futile. Try as they may, good people -- and Theroux seems like a genuinely good person -- will never truly understand evil.

In China, Even Humanity Comes Separate to Power

The question of which society in human history has been the most totalitarian will forever be up for debate.

There is, however, little question about one thing: Communist China will rank close to the top of the list. China would likely be among the top five most totalitarian societies, if not the top three. If not number one.

The Communist Party of China has declared that every institution of the state essentially has one purpose: the perpetuation of the communist political order.

In the concluding chapter of BBC's China, some basic issues of legal equality and human rights are addressed. In the cases of religious freedom, political freedom, legal equality, and even the provision of basic medical care for AIDs victims, a startling fact becomes abundantly clear: in China, even basic, fundamental humanity comes separate to the aims of maintaining the power of the current regime.

Certainly, more and more Chinese are standing up and demanding their rights, and their freedom. But when the government is more concerned with maintaining its own power, this is too often for naught.

Yes, There Is Something Creepier Than Fred Phelps' Grandaughters....

...And it turns out to be a convert to the Westboro Baptist Church. Yes, shokcingly people convert to that particular hate cult.

Louis Theroux's Most Hated Family in America was a startling look behind the public face of the WBC. Upon returning to revisit the Phelps family, Theroux was confronted as a "sewer of inequity" by a former filmmaker turned hate cult member.

The amiability with which the former filmmaker compares Theroux to Pontius Pilate would almost be shocking if it wasn't just so damned creepy.

The Deeper Perversity of Greenpeace China

In Ethical Oil, Ezra Levant finds the soft, vulnerable underbelly of a group that considers itself a world-class environmentalist rabble-rouser: Greenpeace China.

For a group that has prided itself on the ability to produce dramatic and stirring images -- small boats bobbing over calamitous waves while confronting gargantuan whaling ships, massive banners hung from flare stacks at Fort McMurray oilsands sites -- Greenpeace's relationship toward China has been remarkably docile.

As revealed by Levant -- well, perhaps Levant simply reminds readers more than revealing anything -- Greenpeace China, in order to simply exist at the mercy of an oppressive regime, must continually praise what it calls "progress" from China on environmental issues.

Yet, as part one of China reveals, China's environmental record is far from sparkling.

The rush to industrialize China at a rate faster than any previous in human history has led to environmental and human health disasters unimagined anywhere else in the world. In some places, toxic water has transformed cancer rates that were once believed to be one in 100,000 to one in 100 (although, to be entirely fair, some of the jump could be due to increased rates of detection as opposed to new cancers).

The images presented by Chinese activists in China are startling, and make anything produced by the most extreme anti-oilsands critics (such as "mutant fish" that are not actually mutated).

In fact, while China's environment brings cancer and death to so many of its citizens, Greenpeace China spends the bulk of its time complaining about recycling western celphones and disposable chopsticks.

To make matters worse, Chinese environmentalists who are not prepared to simply let these matters go out of deference to employment have very few resources available to them. Chinese law practically forbids suing the government, as lawyers are instructed that their prime goal is to ensure the continuation of the Communist Party political order... even if the communist economic order has long since been abandoned.

As badly as a lot of activists want to make the Fort McMurray oilsands the focus of the world's environmentalist rage, China is a much more dangerous polluter. As the film reveals, acid rain originating from sulphur dioxide emissions in China fall in Japan, Korea and probably Russia and India as well.

Yet Greenpeace refuses to drop the kid gloves with China.

Perhaps Ezra Levant is right: environmentalists love to pick on the oilsands because Canadians are so obliging as targets.

Making Guns Uncool

In Guns are Cool, novelist Courttia Newland confronts the glamourization of guns through venues such as video games, movies and gangsta rap.

Clearly, Newland seems to think of himself as a black Michael Moore; Newland goes so far as to place an on-camera call to Nike to complain about 50 Cent's lyrics. But beyond that, Guns are Cool raises some important questions, while largely ignoring others.

Newland points out that, like in Canada and the United States, the black community in Britain is disproportionately affected by gun crime. Newland insists that this is because black communities are "socially deprived" (which seems to be a rather left-ish method of saying they're impoverished).

Newland suggests that the identification of "black on black" crime as black on black is, in itself, a form of soft racism. But the film declines to confront the question of why so many black Britons target one another as the victims of their crimes.

The idea of creating a nationwide stigma against gun crime, however, promises a method of gun control that would be more effective in the long term than some of the methods of gun control currently being used -- such as the handgun ban that deprives Britons who would use such weapons for self-defense rather than for crime.

The Follies of Foreign Adventurism for Political Gain

As so many ancient myths do, the story of Jason and the Argonauts holds particular lessons for modern leaders.

Namely, the folly of foreign adventurism for the sake of domestic political gain.

The plight of Jason actually seems quite just: he is the rightful heir to the throne of Thessaly, after his Uncle Pelias siezes the throne from his father, Aristo.

When he seeks to recover his usurped throne, his uncle tells him that he may have it back if he can complete a scarcely imaginable task: he must recover the mythical Golden Fleece and return with it to Thessaly.

What unfolds should be taken as a warning to any would-be foreign adventurers: one needs to ensure that they are willing to pay the cost, even if it's in service of a just cause.

As it turns out, the difficulty in obtaining the Fleece didn't merely rest in the acquisition of the Fleece itself. As it turned out, the challenge of obtaining the Fleece rested in the conquering of the various obstacles that beset him along the way, and then in the removal of the Fleece.

Many modern foreign interventions have unfolded the same way. What were expected to be short missions in Afghanistan and Iraq have instead extended into longer foreign interventions.

When one considers the potential cost of such adventures, embarking upon them for mere domestic political gain is absolute folly. (Arguably, one may see this in the Iraq conflict. The meagre threat posed by Iraq certainly didn't justify that particular adventure.)

Rather, such adventures can only truly be justified on two counts: to confront a danger that is truly present, and in support of a cause that is just.

In the course of his quest for the Golden Fleece, Jason commits many acts that do not confront threats to Thessaly -- including Aeetes, the King of Colchis (modern day Georgia), whom he betrayed with the help of Medea.

With Medea -- one of the prizes Jason brings back to Thessaly -- Jason ultimately returns with the ultimate tool of his own destruction. Coupled with the outrage Medea feels over a plan by Jason to marry the daughter of a Corinthian King, Jason is, in the end, destroyed.

Left by his wife, deprived of his sons (murdered by Medea), and spurned by the Corinthian ruling class for the actions of his wife (who also murdered Jason's fiancee and her father), Jason is eventually crushed by the rotten stern of the Argo itself.

This befalls Jason because he was not wary of the dangers posed by his foreign adventurism. In the end, he ultimately brought the greatest of those dangers home with him -- in the form of the moral degradation of himself and others -- and all for his own political gain.

A wiser would-be ruler would have found another way to affect that gain. Jason does not, and in the end he pays the price.

The Historical Political Appeal of Myth

In , Michael Wood tells the story of a table once believed to be the famed Round Table of King Arthur. Preserved and passed down through history, the table was at one point preserved by Henry VIII, who regarded himself to be the heir to Arthur's legacy.

Many British rulers have -- publicly or privately -- regarded the mythical Aurthur as a paragon of a virtuous king, to be emulated. Arthur is regarded as the penultimate benevolent ruler.

Arthur's myth came to possess a great amount of political appeal.

Henry VIII established the Anglican Church, and broke the Catholic Church's hold over England.

Of course, Henry VIII did not act out of noble ambitions. He acted out of the desire to divorce his wife, in the desperation to produce a male heir to the throne.

The Catholic Church wouldn't allow Henry to to divorce his wife. His actions eventually resulted in his excommunication from the Church.

In time, Henry's legacy would be religious conflict between Catholics and Protestants throughout British colonial holdings -- particularly in Ireland and Canada.

Depending on which version of the Arthur legend one ascribes to -- the classic legend, or the one many historians promote, in which Arthurius led northern Pagans to ally with Woads to create a society based on religious and ethnic tolerance -- the legacies of King Arthur and Henry VIII couldn't be more disparate.

Steyn vs Freud... Who Would've Thunk It?

When Macleans magazine published an excerpt from America Alone entitled "The Future Belongs to Islam", it eventually led to the magazine being subject to a human rights complaint.

Various Canadian Muslim groups objected to the excerpt, and feared it would stir up public hostility against Muslims. There may have been fair reason to worry about this (although the Human Rights complaint itself was clearly frivolous).

But part three of the Century of the Self presents a theme that puts an interesting twist on the Steyn thesis: as a spin-off off an ancient showdown between psychiatric quacks.

The quacks in case are Anna Freud -- the daughter of Sigmund Fruend, who considered the human sex drive to be dangerous -- and Whilhem Reich, who considered a healthy sex life to be the definitive factor of human mental health.

A decidated life-long virgin, Freud was considered to be something of a prude. When Reich's theories came to her attention, Freud took it upon herself to destroy her career.

Reich believed that human sexuality wasn't merely the key to human flourishing in terms of demographics alone. He also believed that orgasm was central to human mental health. By modern standards, it stands out as a lunatic idea, but it's implications for Steyn's argument are intriguing, to say the least.

In the excerpt, Steyn argues a very basic and intuitive thesis: the Muslim world is reproducing at a far faster rate than the western world. In terms of sheer numbers alone, this could put the Islamic world in the position of being able to overwhelm and envelope the rest.

This is certainly a terrifying prospect for many of Steyn's most fervent admirers, who fear Muslims.

Western and Muslim attitudes toward sex are remarkably different. Through innovations in birth control, the western world has embraced sex for pleasure like at no other time in human history, perhaps exempting the height of Roman decadence. The increasing cultural focus on sex becomes most apparent through an examination of pop culture.

Meanwhile, the (at least stereotypical) Muslim attitude toward sex is considered far less enthusiastic.

As individuals, the western world has far more sex than the Muslim world and produces far fewer children. Some may say that birth control is to blame for this state of affairs and while they would be correct, any proposal to eliminate birth control is unequivocally not the answer.

If one were to judge the comparative mental illness of the western and Muslim worlds based on Reich's theory, one may be drawn toward the issue of suicide bombers. It takes a particularly fervent individual to commit to killing themselves as a means of attacking their enemies -- some could consider this to be a symptom of some sort of mental illness.

The irony is astounding: the Muslim world has less casual sex, but more children (whom some would, rightly or wrongly, consider to be candidates for future suicide bombings). If Reich's theories had any merit at all, it would be ironic that the innovations that have allowed the western world to enjoy the mental health benefits of casual sex have also led to a state of affairs in which they've put the western world at a disadvantage.

This is, of course, assuming that one grants credence to Wilhelm Reich's theories (one should not), and that one agrees with Mark Steyn (one may not).

The Quest for Total Control

In part two of The Century of the Self, Adam Curtis outlines how the psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud were applied in an effort to try to prevent a mass movement like the one present in Nazi Germany from ever emerging in the United States.

Ironically, the progenitors of these efforts wound up seeking precisely the kind of total control that the Nazi Party had sought in Germany.

Sigmund Freud believed that psychoanalysis could, at best, help people understand the internal forces within their own minds. His daughter Anna Freud, however, had different ideas entirely: she believed that people could learn to control these internal forces.

Of course, if an individual could learn how to control these forces, it isn't unthinkable that other people could learn how to control them on the individual'a behalf.

This at least partially seemed to be the impetus behind the National Mental Health Strategy introduced by Harry Truman's government in the post-war years. It mixed a demonstrable actual need -- the need to find ways to effectively treat the post-traumatic stress disorder, known then as shell shock, that many American veterans had returned from the war with -- with the desire to manipulate peole for economic or political gain.

The focus of these efforts was on identifying psychological barriers to certain acts, and removing them.

Political authorities turned the techniques of psychoanalysis toward creating a stable American society -- toward building a common identity that would lead toward constructive collective action.

But this is exactly what the Nazi Party had sought to do in Germany. They recognized a German society that had become unstable under the dual strains of the Great Depression and post-World War One political instability, and sought to establish Nazism as the means by which stability would be restored to Germany.

In some regards, they succeeded. The irrational behaviour of the German masses under Nazism were directed toward rationed -- if not rational -- ends.

To this end, the efforts of Anna Freud and her contemporaries were potentially self-defeating.

The Rationality of Irrationality

In part one of Adam Curtis' The Century of the Self, Adam Curtis investigates how the psychological theories of Sigmund Freud were exploited in by Edward Burnays -- a nephew of Freud's -- to develop marketing techniques that exploited people's emotions to make them believe that emotionally-driven decisions were being made rationally.

What Burnays kick-started has over decades grown into marketing techniques whereby products are no longer sold, but rather the idea of a lifestyle.

As Benjamin Barber points out, sometimes the lifestyles being marketed are at odds with the products themselves. During the average sports telecast, for example, one will encounter ads for sporting goods such as Nike and Reebok. The idea is that one will buy the idea that by buying these goods they'll be able to emulate their sporting heroes.

During the same telecast, however, one will also encounter ads for fastfood restaurants and alcohol. This lifestyle message is at direct odds with those offered by the producers of sporting goods.

After all, few professional athletes are frequent visitors to McDonald's restaurants. Those who over-indulge in Budweiser and Smirnoff vodka will certainly not enjoy long-term success.

The fast food and alcohol advertisements are much more in tune with the lifestyle choices of the average sports spectator. As Barber notes, the lifestyle promoted through these telecasts is not one of actually playing hockey, football or basketball, but rather of being a spectator.

A lifestyle of watching, not one of doing.

Without the work of people like Edward Burnays, such things would never have been possible.

Unravelling the Puzzle of Neo-Conservatism

The War Party, a BBC documentary about American neo-conservatives and their influence on the Iraq War.

But what it fails to provide is the context for the neo-conservative belief in evil.

As it turns out, neo-conservatives were originally anti-communist liberals who joined the conservative movement because they found contemporary liberalism to be too soft on communism.

While the Holocaust does weigh heavy in the mind of neo-conservatives (who, despite the protestation of modern contemporary liberals, recognize that it was born of a left-wing regime), Stalinist atrocities like Holodomor weigh heavier.

That communism -- and its sister ideology, national socialism (with particular emphasis on the socialism for the benefit of the wilfully ignorant) is evidence to many neo-conservatives that evil very much does exist in the world.

More contemporary conservatives may be more likely to question the prospect of evil's existence at all.

Just as "neo-conservative" was coined as an insult by that era's contemporary conservatives, it has been embraced as an insult by this era's contemporary liberals, who are often all too unaware of what neo-conservatism truly is.

Neo-conservatives embraced the label because there's nothing shameful in it. Neo-conservatives recognize that there are various threats in the world. During the Cold War it was communism. Today, it's terrorism.

They also recognize that evil often manifests itself through these threats.

Unlike the contemporary liberals of the 1970s and '80s, neo-conservatives intend to never understimate the danger posed by those threats, and intend to never forget the kinds of evil acts that can be prepetrated in their advancement.

This isn't to be said that neo-conservatives themselves don't pose any dangers. As the Iraq War demonstrates, their inability to practice restraint in the course of implimenting this agenda often harms it.

In the war on terror, the key front is in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Iraq has only been a wholesale distraction from this -- something that neo-conservatives in the Democratic party have seemingly recognized better than those among the Republicans.

(Don't) Blame Reagan

1983: The Brink of Apocalypse chronicles the story of what is considered to have nearly become a full-out nuclear war between the Soviet Union and the United States. It lays the blame for the near-war at the feet of Ronald Reagan, the Strategic Defense Initiative and NATO's operation Able Archer (a war game exercise involving signal squads in West Germany).

The time has long come for contemporary liberals to stop letting the Soviet Union off of the hook for incidents such as the one chronicled in the film.

First off, if the Soviet Union really had enjoyed the kind of advantage described in the film -- it didn't, as the Soviet defense sector quickly proved to be unsustainable -- then the development of the SDI was actually entirely justified.

Soviet fears about a decapitation attack be damned. The United States had -- and still has -- every right to take any means necessary to protect themselves from nuclear weapons.

The nuclear threat once posed by the Soviet Union no longer exists, and so SDI is no longer justified -- which is why George W Bush's decision to resume development of the missile shield was actually unjustified.

Moreover, one should remember that while the United States maintained a policy of first use of nuclear weapons, they did not maintain a policy of first strike. Conversely, the Soviet Union maintained a policy of first strike, if not first use of nuclear weapons.

Moreover, the ancient complaint about Reagan's "evil empire" speech has become entirely passe. 80s-era Soviet officials may be as outraged about the speeches as they like, but they should have long ago been called to account for the oppressive nature of the USSR, and they'd have difficulty convincing anyone from then-Czechoslovakia or Hungary that the Soviet Union's foreign policy was not aggressive.

Moreover, the Soviet gunning down of a Korean airliner (ironically, flight 007) demonstrated a certain recklessness in Soviet defense policy.

It's time for the soft-on-communism portion of the left to stop offering the same old weak excuses for Soviet Communism, and stop casting the figer of blame at Ronald Reagan for cold war near-misses.

The Ragged Edge of Prejudice

A significant portion of the third part of Folk in America deals with the close links between the folk music scene and the civil rights movement during the 1960s.

Among other artists, Bob Dylan performed at rallies for Martin Luther King Jr in support of racial integration.

The film also highlights the role of the famed New Port folk festival in helping to facilitate the process by bringing many black folk musicians out of retirement to perform live for the first time in years.

The power of music to challenge racial prejudices has been recognized for decades. Elvis Presley brought black rythm and blues and gospel music to an audience that had long been insulated from such stylings. Before long, black culture didn't seem nearly as alien and threatening to many people as they once did.

But Folk in America also reminds us that there are limits to the tolerance of any group, even those purported to be the most enlightened.

It was at the very same New Port festival where so many black folk artists were brought out of retirement, Bob Dylan committed what was regarded by so many folk enthusiasts as a cardinal sin -- he went electric.

Musical purists who were the most eager to accept racial integration -- and rightly so -- were among those least eager to accept musical integration between folk music and rock n' roll. Just as those who resisted racial integration were doomed by history, so were those who resisted musical integration. By the time the Beatles arrived in the United States, the matter was a fait accompli -- much like racial integration was largely inevitable by the time of JFK's arrival.

The march toward musical integration continues today in some ways that would have previously been deemed unthinkable. The combination of folk and country music with rap and hip hop still finds intense resistance, yet such musical stylings continue to find larger and larger audiences continually in search of something new and fresh.

But there are purists among each musical style who fervently resist such integration. While it may be en vogue to dismiss such critics as racially intolerant, this fallacy is largely supported by the notions that few musical genres have ever been as black as rap, and have never been as white as country.

Yet artists like Charley Pride or Eminem (say nothing about Vanilla Ice -- period) would beg to differ. Artists like Kid Rock or Buck 65 even more so.

The Missing Link of Folksy Copyright Law

Woody Guthrie's music reminds one of a central fact about not only folk music, but about modern cultural products in general: under many conditions, the contemporary notion of authorship can be rendered antiquated.

Guthrie freely admitted that much of his music was borrowed from previous folk musicians, and from songs that were part of what legal scholars deem the "cultural commons". In many senses, Guthrie wrote and re-wrote songs that had already been written and played for generations, meaning that many previous musicians served an authoring function in his music.

As one considers cultural products in the modern context, many different levels of authorship emerge. Music is written not by one individual, but by various musicians, mixed by sound engineers, packaged with art created by graphic designers, and this process is supervised by a team of producers and executive producers.

Through the recording process, a myriad of people fulfil various portions of the author function, usually under the employment of a large multi-national corporation.

In the United States, objections have been raised to the repeated extensions of copyright, in some cases, up to the lifetime of the author plus another 70 years, after which that product is to enter the cultural commons, and be considered public cultural property.

There's a fallacy at the heart of this notion, however. It's predicated on the assumption that a cultural work -- be it music, a book, a movie, or almost anything else -- was created by one and only one creator.

In the case of modern music, it could be argued that multinational corporations that fulfill an author function -- by virtue of having organized the entire process -- could hold onto a copyright indefinitely. After all, corporations are not bound by biology to have a finite lifespan. Rather, the lifespan of a corporation is larely determined according to its financial success or failure.

Moreover, recognizing the various author functions within a cultural product leads to some other challenges. A copyright law that recognized such differences would have to recognize that it may not be logically feasible to copyright a finished product as if it were indivisible, leading separate individuals to seek separate copyrights over their own contributions to that finished product.

A postmodern copyright law for a postmodern era could lead to some complications that even the most brilliant legal scholar may not predict.

Political Anthems of a Distant Yesteryear

Folk in America is a three-part BBC documentary mini-series exploring the rise of folk music in North America.

As the film reveals, folk music presented musical stylings that were at once quaint and deeply political. The disaffection felt by the Southern United States following the end of the civil war in time gave way to the disaffection felt by a region depressed by the economic disadvantages it faced comparable to the industrialized Northern states.

The music became particularly popular in mining regions like the Appalachians, where they became protest anthems of a long-lost yesteryear.

The yesteryear that produced the folk musicians spoken of in the film seem all the more distant because they haven't merely been displaced from the current day in terms of time -- it has also been displaced by an economic model that was only beginning to be explored at the time when record companies first began to produce folk music.

The popularization of southern folk music provided a model for the popularization of other regional musical forms. A classic example would be the rise during the 1970s of Reggae music. In time, various regional musical stylings would be deeply incorporated into the genre that we today know as folk music.

Like folk music from the Southern United States, reggae music became popular at a time when the Jamaican economy had little else to offer. In fact, the recording industry was one of the driving forces of the Jamaican economy during the 1970s, and it relied heavily on record exports, as a depressed domestic economy provided fewer opportunities for Jamaican artists to sell their music.

Not that they didn't manage -- Jamaicans were often noted to choose between spending their meagre earnings on necessities of life or on the newest LP by their favourite reggae artist.

But in time as reggae popularized it also commercialized, taking on elements of other popular forms of music. In some cases, this helped give birth to new musical genres like Ska or dancehall reggae. In other cases, it simply resulted in stale or uninspired attempts at reggae.

In the time before the popularization of folk music, and the various regionalized genres that have become incorporated within it, music was cultivated within tightly-woven communities and within the home. This lent a vibrancy to the music that many musical genres lack today.

With the rise of web 2.0 and new options for musicians to produce and market their own music, this model has become partially resurgent. But wherever commercial success is to be found, the desire to mass produce potentially profitable products -- such as music -- will lurk.

And when music is mass-produced, the first thing to suffer is the passion and creativity that lends itself to truly time music -- such as early folk.

Creating the Enemy, One Way or Another

In Power of Nightmares, BBC documentary producer offers a revealing look at the politics of fear.

In the series, Curtis treats fear as a substitute for political ideology. During the course of the films, he posits that several of the threats used to provoke this environment of fear were largely constructed by politicians in search of a new pathway to power.

Curtis' thesis, however -- that there is no organized terrorist threat in the world today -- has a ludicrous conspiracy theory-esque quality to it. It seems especially so in the wake of the the events of Christmas Day, an attack that could have been successful if not for the vigilance of the passengers onboard the plane.

However, the recognition of this threat doesn't come without risks of its own. A sick passenger was detained less than a day after the initial plot was foiled.

At the same time, a portion of Curtis' thesis provokes an interesting thought: that the additional notoriety Al Qaida enjoyed in the wake of the 9/11 attacks has helped it greatly expand its area of influence, helping them capture the loyalty of individuals who otherwise would have remained entirely marginalized.

So even if the world knows full well that Curtis' argument is not true -- that the existence of globalized Islamic terrorism existed well in advance of 9/11 -- to opine that it may not have grown as strong as it has since if not for the attention paid to 9/11 and, later, 7/7, is not at all an unreasonable proposition.

Then again, one may wonder precisely what Adam Curtis may imagine the alternative would have been. To ignore the threat posed by terrorism -- domestic or global -- is unthinkable, for reasons that are self-evident.

Winning a Just Victory

In part two of The Power of Nightmares, Adam Curtis digs a little deeper into the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the United States' move to fund and support the Mujahideen groups resisting them, and the aftermath of the war.

In the aftermath of the Soviet expulsion from Afghanistan, Curtis notes that both the United States and the Mujahideen believed they had defeated the Soviet Union. When the Berlin wall fell, each side rushed to claim credit for what would, in time, be the end of the Eastern bloc and the USSR.

No real peace emerged from the Afghan-Soviet War, despite the fact that many considered it to be an entirely just war.

Much like a just war has to be fought for just purposes, a just peace has to be maintained for just purposes.

But in order for a just war to lead to a just peace, it requires one important element: a just victory.

In this case, a just victory shouldn't necessarily be defined solely by whether the side whose violence was justified wins. It should also take into account the means by which they won.

For example, the Second World War is considered to be the most just war ever fought. It was a war to prevent Nazi dominion over the continent of Europe, and Japanese dominion over Asia and the Pacific ocean. In time, the world even came to learn of Adolph Hitler's genocidal enterprise in Europe. Stopping the Holocaust is often referred to as the fundamental justification for the war.

Yet winning the war for the allies -- the justified party -- required some acts that would be considered unthinkable today. The firebombing of Hamburg and Dresden, as well as the use of nuclear weapons against Hiroshima and Nagasaki consistute acts which some historians argue were war crimes. While the nature of the total war fought by both sides the war calls into question whether or not modern notions should be considered truly applicable to the acts, they have led many to wonder if the victory won by the allies in WWII was truly a just victory.

In the end, perhaps the definitive element of a just victory is whether or not it results in a just peace.

The general criteria for defining a just peace, as defined by Pierre Allan and Alexis Keller, require that each side recognize the autonomy of the other, that each side needs to recognize the identity of the other, that concessions need to be made by each side, and that rules need to be in place to ensure that such a peace is sustainable.

In Afghanistan, the Soviet Union simply withdrew when the cost of occupying the country became too high. No peace was mediated between the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan government led by Mohammad Najibullah and the Mujahideen who had driven the Soviet Union from Afghanistan. A civil war ensued, and Najibullah was eventually executed after the Taliban took control of Kabul.

Not only had no peace process taken place, no peace process had taken place involving all of the parties involved. One oc the consequences for this is that no one could agree precisely who had won the conflict, leaving each of the victorious paries -- the United States and the diffuse collection Mujahideen -- with no agreement regarding who had won, and who was responsible for that victory.

As Curtis notes, the Islamist movement that had spawned the Mujahideen claimed credit for the victory went on to declare its right to dictate the course of Muslim society as a whole. The actions that they undertook were fundamentally unjust.

Meanwhile, the United States -- particularly the small ideological cohort that had worked so hard to promote the American role in the conflict -- also claimed credit for the victory, and went on to assert its right to dictate American foreign policy. The actions that they undertook are more reasonably debatable.

Either way, the lack of a just peace led each side -- benefactor and client -- back into conflict with one another, as figures such as Osama Bin Laden began to target the United States as a method of intimidating its allies among the governments of coutnries such as Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.

The United States and the Mujahideen failed to win a just victory in Afghanistan because they had never agreed on what the purpose of their victory would be. Whether or not both sides could ever have agreed on the purpose of that victory, considering the course each followed after, is probably unlikely.

The Nightmare Scenario of Jihad vs McWorld

What Adam Curtis applies in part one of The Power of Nightmares is an extremely intricate application of Benjamin Barber's Jihad vs McWorld hypothesis.

First in Jihad vs McWorld, and later in Consumed, Barber presented a theory of globalization that suggested that there were two fundamental cultural forces at work in the world today: Jihad and McWorld.

Jihad, as Barber defines it, is the realm of identity politics. The tendency of Jihad is to argue that external influences are polluting and perverting the cultural identity and integrity of the group in question. Moreover, it tends to overwhelmingly be the realm of cultural conservativism.

This spirit of cultural conservatism permeated not only the theories of Sayyid Qutb -- who, as the film notes, actually found the United States of the 1950s to be too hedonistic for his liking -- as well as those of the identified neoconservative elements that emerged within the United States itself.

(Curtis' claims actually rely on an oversimplification of neoconservatism, but there's a distinct shortage of space to discuss that here.)

The other side of Barber's theory revolves around McWorld: the forces of consumerism. While Jihad is inherently collectivist in nature, McWorld tends to favour individualism, at -- at least on the surface -- seems to favour a libertarian worldview.

This isn't to say that the two forces aren't inter-foldable. In fact, Jihad and McWorld tend to fold into one another remarkably effectively. For example, religious conservatives -- certainly the agents of Barber's concept of Jihad -- have effectively harnessed the tools of McWorld, marketing their message through television, movies, music, and constructing MegaChurches the size of sports arenas.

Moreover, the merging of conservative Christianity with organized politics drug them even further into the realm of McWorld, by way of the advanced marketing tactics used by such politicians.

Barber defines these kinds of phenomenae quite clearly in his book: it's the phenomenon of Jihad via McWorld. The irony of these culturally conservative elements using the very tools with which McWorld promotes itself points to the instability within each force. As much as either would seek to insulate itself from its opposite, neither can ever actually accomplish that goal.

The Politics of (Recognizing) Genocide

Produced by the BBC, The Betrayed is a documentary that examines the matter of the Armenian Genocide in Turkey, and the efforts to have that genocide recognized in other countries.

The Armenian Genocide, beginning in 1915, was actually the first of what was expected to be a three-pronged program of ethnic cleansing in the declining Ottoman Empire. The plan was to first eliminate the Armenians, then eliminate Kurds, and eventually even eliminate Turkey's Greek population.

Perversely, the Ottomans used their next target, the Kurds, to massacre the Armenians, coercing entire battalions of Kurds to act as death squads.

Just as Turkey continues to deny the Armenian genocide, they also continue to deny the national plight of the Kurds. Despite the fact that Turkey currently occupies a large portion of historical Kurdistan (Iraq, Iran and Syria, occupy the rest), Turkey continues to insist that the land ever existed.

Turkey's Kurds have coped with their complicity in the Armenian genocide by casting it as a far-off event, occurring far beyond the boundaries of the formerly-Armenian villages populated largely by Kurds today.

Turkey has historically treated efforts to recognize the genocide as a diplomatic outrage. On some occasions, foreign countries have cowed to the pressure, agreeing to not recognize the genocide officially.

We may not like to admit it, but there very much are political considerations to whether or not a country will recognize that a genocide has occurred in a foreign country.

Over the last several years, scarecely-reported diplomatic progress with Syria was facilitated by Turkey, as Turkey helped Syria in its attempts to negotiate Trade Associate status with the European Union.

The original deal -- which would have helped to pull Syria out of Iran's orbit of influence -- was scuttled when the United States moved to isolate Syria as a terrorism-supporting state.

Efforts to formalize such a deal have resumed, but seem much less promising than before the 2004 intervention.

Recognition of Turkish atrocities could potentially jeopardize Turkey's invaluable role as intermediary between the Middle East and the Western World.

No one likes this -- nor should like it. But it seems that pragmatic politics can often trump historical truth in the lands of realpolitic.

Tony Blair's Tender Legacy

As alluded to in part one of Michael Cockerell's Tony Blair: the Inside Story, many politicians spend a great deal of time and energy concerning themselves with their legacy.

Unfortunately for former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, he will very likely share a legacy with US President George W Bush. It likely will not be an entirely positive one.

Like George W Bush, Blair's departure from office was mired by tension with his successor. Just as Bush's departure from office has been mired by increasing tensions with his Vice President, Dick Cheney -- who believed Bush had stopped taking his advice during their second term -- Blair's final days were marked by tensions beteween himself and Gordon Brown, his Chancellor of the Exchequer.

For Bush and Cheney, the matter was clearly the war on terror. For Blair and Brown, the issue was the prospects of Britain replacing Pounds Sterling with the Euro as Britain's currency. Blair favoured this, and Brown did not.

Like Bush, Blair's legacy will be decided by whether or not he led his country to war under false pretenses. Like Bush, Blair's legacy will be impacted by personal controversy. For Bush, a lingering controversy was the outing of CIA agent Valeri Plame. For Bush, the lingering controversy was the suicide of Dr David Kelly, a British arms inspector who had been accused of helping falsify evidence justifying the war.

Like Bush, Blair's efforts to reform the civil service badly backfired. There was a palpable backlash against Blair's proposed reforms for hospitals and schools. Meanwhile, Bush led a dismantling of regulatory economic agencies that eventually helped precipitate a global economic recession. Bush's educational and health care reforms were widely lampooned. At one point, Bush even vetoed a Democrat bill that would supply health care to millions of uninsured children.

Like Bush, Blair left office amidst a push within his own party to minimize its association with him. While Brown worked behind the scenes to collectively push and shame Blair out of office, Bush failed to show up to his own party convention in order to best keep his distance from Presidential nominee John McCain.

Like Bush, Blair was viewed as a liability to his party. In a 2005 election that proved to be a significant setback for his party, Blair was targeted by the opposition Conservative party of Britain as an individual who had lied to take Britain to war in Iraq, and would lie to win an election. Bush was encouraged to stay as far away from the 2008 federal election campaign as he could in order to avoid associating McCain too closely with Bush.

(These efforts were mitigated when McCain hugged Bush at a political rally.)

Like Bush, Blair's time in office was marked by a savage terrorist attack. For Bush, 9/11 eventually wound up writing the story of his time as President. For Blair, 7/7 will be central to his legacy. Unlike Bush, however, who led his country to war partially as a retaliation for a terrorist attack, 7/7 could be viewed as a retaliation for Britain's involvement in Iraq.

Just as Bush's government had received ample warnings about the impending 9/11 attacks, Blair's government had received numerous warnings about the "inevitable" attacks that finally came to fruition on 7/7.

Like Bush, Blair led his party into office as a well-organized political machine, ready to do its country's business. Like Bush, by the time Blair departed, his party was in shambles, with its premier political opposition -- in this case, the David Cameron-led British Tories -- poised to knock them off in the next election.

For a man who came to power at the head of an overwhelming Parliamentary majority, Blair must be very disappointed to look back at his time in office and see such a disappointing record.

Blair came to office as a "destined" Prime Minister, with big hopes and huge expectations to live up to. Like many such leaders, the dizzying heights of his expectations could only be matched by the dispirting depths of disappointment.