Adam Curtis has made a documentary on the Saudis and their malign influence around the world, especially in Afghanistan. However, I still couldn’t wrap my brains around one of the concepts he talked about, in which he mentioned that Soviet soldiers after the war in Afghanistan in the 80’s brought back the Muhajadeen ghosts with them, and that Western armies were doing the same, obviously a metaphor, but could someone explain it in layman’s terms?
Here is a trailer.
There was also a part of the film in which the US accidentally bombed an Afghan village and some of the villagers were rioting, however, did they film people being thrown off a school building?
Other than that, it was a grand visual experience very well done. Has anyone else seen this? What do you think.
I agree the ghosts are much wider than just the personal damage like PTSD. I took Curtis to mean that the experiences in Afghanistan left the Soviet soldiers and aid workers brutalised, corrupted, cynical and mistrustful of their own government and the whole communist programme. And many of the volunteer teachers and doctors would have been the type of true believers that would have gone on to be the next generation of Soviet leaders. Instead they returned bitter and broken, with corrosive effects on the already shaky Soviet state. And Curtis pretty much explicitly says he thinks the same dynamic is at play with the US and UK participants. The interview with the ex-army captain, talking about how they were manipulated by the various Afghan factions in Helmand province is a good example.
I couldn’t help but wonder what happened to the young woman in the 1980s who talked about how the Revolution and the Soviet development mission would bring equality to Afghan women, and what will happen to the other young women who said almost exactly the same thing twenty years later about the US development programme.
This is on the BBC iplayer so I’ll have that downloaded ready for when the mood takes me.
I find Curtis’s work fascinating from an aesthetic point of view. The man has visual and verbal style even if I find myself evenly split on whether I agree with him or not.
Be that as it may, he still makes me think and question and that can’t be a bad thing.
Another series worth checking out is “All watched over by machines of loving grace” an exploration of the failure of computers to liberate mankind (but of course it ranges much further than that)
Love watching his stuff. It’s well researched an opinionated, and makes you question…
I spent a bit of time reading one of his long blogs covering the history of attempts westernise Afghanistan as far back I think as the 1920’s, certainly 1950’s. Various attempts to civilise the tribes, put them in settlements. Bring consumerism. Build dams. All failed. Various governments up and down, and the same great ideas being brought over and abandoned…
Can’t find the link at the moment. I remember reading it bit by bit over weeks at a job which was a bit boring…
I watched this last night - v good.
Didn’t have great expectations tbh - easy to take the piss wrt Curtis (this youtube parody skewers him pretty good), his style is getting a bit played out and his last effort showed him up IMHO.
How-ever, this was a really focussed piece. Shouldn’t be - It’s like a brief history of geo-politics crammed into 2 hours over a burial sound-track, but the Afghanistan theme is really effectively done. V impressive documentary making.
Slight disclaimer in that I watched it on the turbo trainer, so a bit mentally fogged - maybe that helped! There were a lot of long, contemplative sequences that might not work so well as a normal telly program.
"Take that, David Attenborough! They would have stayed to watch You Have Used Me as a Fish Long Enough"
Seriously though, a documentary whose point is that the public is fed simple stories which only cause more complex problems, then tells the story of the Wars in Afghanistan but only mentions Pakistan as where the Saudis put madrassas?