An old friend of mine knows him quite well. Says he's also a global warming denier who believes it became an issue after some old upper-class eugenicist/Nazi sympathiser persuaded the world's leading scientific bodies that AGW was a reality as some dastardly plot to advance the cause of population control. (My mate actually believes this shit too, he wasn't trying to discredit him.)
That's a doc I'd like to see, though I hope for his rep he never makes it.
edit: Curtis, that is., not Rupey.
his presentation was largely not to do with arab countries, or even libya, really, but about the west, western politics, british citizens' somewhat ignorant view of our own govt's hypocrisies.
Good post, rdr.
Well yeah, I'm sure no-one here needs to be told that (Westerners') anti-imperialist/anti-colonialist politics can be just as West-centric as the imperialism they criticize.
I note that all these comments are endorsing my historic dismissal of Curtis dating back to the ludicrous 'Power of Nighmares' which I eviscerated on an bad-tempered thread back in the day.
First Fry and now Curtis - any other middlebrow sacred cows you wanna go full "I HATED HIM FIRST!" on?
You're not keen on Will Self either, if memory serves.
I do feel that Curtis' much sniggered at Hypernormalisation seems more relevant and less fanciful now post-Trump... his whole Surkov/Chaos shtick doesn't feel like quite the narrative liberty it was taken to be back in 2016. There, I said it.
First Fry and now Curtis - any other middlebrow sacred cows you wanna go full "I HATED HIM FIRST!" on?
You're not keen on Will Self either, if memory serves.
I can appreciate what lanugo is saying here but as has been stated, it really is an argument about the accidental/deterministic nature of both the origins and continuing perpetuation of our current global system of op unsustainable, exploititive economics. I will once again bring the discussion back round to Curtis and state emphatically that the real thrust and purpose of all of his work in the last twenty years has been to suggest that trends of mass disempowerment are as a result of exactly this type of thinking - Lanugo's, I mean.
History is crafted in such a way whereby worldviews such as that of the irresponsible conspiracy-theorist, a tired '60s leftist approach of us-vs-them, as Grizzleb states, are both welcomed and easily festered. It's a disempowering worldview to have because it attempts to create and energize this image of the global elite as all-powered, supremely intelligent and endlessly cunning - whereas in fact, they might just be impaled on their own greed, trapped in their social class, completely subject to economic and social forces, and no more intelligent than anybody. It's as if the system itself has now been cultivated and has now taken on a chaotic and monstrous intelligence of it's own - continual 'enslavement' is assured so long as the belief is upheld that we no longer have any say or any power in the matter. Curtis films, particularly The Trap, The Living Dead and All Watch Over... have this theme and this message as their central tenet.
I enjoyed this interview with Errol Morris that Curtis recently did, in which this exchange occurred:
EM: "Is history primarily a history of conspiracy? Or is it just a series of blunders, one after the other? Confusions, self-deceptions, idiocies of one kind or another? "
AC: "It’s the latter. Where people do set out to have conspiracies, they don’t ever end up like they're supposed to. History is a series of unintended consequences resulting from confused actions, some of which are committed by people who may think they're taking part in a conspiracy, but it never works out the way they intended."
Curtis' other triumph is the way that he curtails the dull Leftist approach of endlessly demonizing the Right, the seperationist attitude that perpetuates a Christian image of 'evil'. There certainly are bad people, as IdleRich states, but perhaps mostly it's just a case of ingnorance and sometimes even well-meaning self-delusion that has created the situation we are in now. That doesn't mean we shouldn't submit and forget the Bastards, but only doing so with a realistic and holistically-understanding attitude will get anywhere, surely. If you want to defeat the Right, you have to understand them and where they are coming from, etc.