British - Director | May 26, 1955 -
Tyler Kent himself is weird and mesmerising - but still unrepentantly anti-Semitic.
Adam Curtis
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We live in a time when all elites, whether on the left or the right, believe in rigid rules that say there is no alternative to the present political and economic system.
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The latest rule is: you cannot have protectionism - otherwise you will get a world war. Other rules say you cannot have collective ideas that involve the surrender of the individual to the group - otherwise, you get totalitarianism or, even worse, religion.
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Everyone goes on holiday in Britain. Even Hell's Angels.
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In 'Mad Men,' we watch a group of people who live in a prosperous society that offers happiness and order like never before in history and yet are full of anxiety and unease. They feel there is something more, something beyond. And they feel stuck.
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James Goldsmith is important because he used the power of the markets to break up the cosy patrician elite that ran Britain and its industries in the 1950s and '60s. In the process, Goldsmith helped transfer power in this country away from politics and towards the markets and the financial sector.
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BP is accused of destroying the wildlife and coastline of America, but if you look back into history, you find that BP did something even worse to America. They gave the world Ayatollah Khomeini.
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Of course there are many factors that led to the Iranian revolution, but back in 1951, the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company - which would later become BP - and its principal owner, the British government, conspired to destroy democracy and install a western-controlled regime in Iran.
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Throughout the western world, new systems have risen up whose job is to constantly record and monitor the present - and then compare that to the recorded past. The aim is to discover patterns, coincidences and correlations, and from that, find ways of stopping change. Keeping things the same.
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In the battle for Kobane on the Syrian border, everyone talks about the enemy - IS - and the frightening ideas that drive them. No one talks about the Kurdish defenders and what inspires them.
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There are two - parallel - universes of science. One is the actual day-to-day work of scientists, patiently researching into all parts of the world and sometimes making amazing discoveries. The other is the role science plays in the public imagination - the powerful effect it has in shaping how millions of ordinary people see the world.
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Politicians used to have the confidence to tell us stories that made sense of the chaos of world events. But now there are no big stories, and politicians react randomly to every new crisis - leaving us bewildered and disorientated.
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