HyperNormalisation Page #14

But instead of becoming a democracy,

Libya began to descend into chaos.

And the other revolutions were also failing.

The Occupy camps had become

trapped in endless meetings.

And it became clear that there

was a terrible confusion at

the heart of the movement.

The radicals had believed that if

they could create a new way of organising people

then a new society would emerge.

But what they did not have

was a picture of what that

society would be like, a vision of the future.

The truth was that their

revolution was not about an idea.

It was about how you manage things.

And those who had started the revolution

in Egypt came face-to-face

with the same terrible fact.

Social media had helped

to bring people together in Tahrir square.

But once there, the internet gave no clue as

to what kind of new society

they could create in Egypt.

The movement stalled.

And a group that DID have a powerful idea - the

Muslim Brotherhood - rushed in to fill the vacuum.

The Brotherhood took power in an election

and one of them, Mohamed Morsi, became President.

The liberals and the Left were shocked.

And, bit by bit, they turned back to

the military, protesting, asking them to save

the revolution from being captured by Islamists.

In the spring of 2013, the military took action.

They arrested the President and

killed hundreds of his supporters who protested.

And an extraordinary spectacle

unfolded in Tahrir Square.

Thousands of the liberal activists who

had begun the revolution two years before,

summoned by social media, now welcomed the

military back by waving their laser pens at the

helicopters flying overhead.

The crowd had been summoned

there once again by Facebook.

After the failure of the revolutions, it was not

just the radicals - no-one in the West had

any idea of how to change the world.

At home, the politicians

had given so much of their

power away, to finance and the ever-growing

managerial bureaucracies, that they in effect

had become managers themselves.

While abroad, all their adventures had failed.

And their simplistic vision

of the world had been exposed

as dangerous and destructive.

But in Russia, there was a group of men who

had seen how this very lack of belief in

politics, and dark uncertainty about the

future could work to their advantage.

What they had done was turn

politics into a strange

theatre where nobody knew what was true or

what was fake any longer.

They were called political

technologists and they were

the key figures behind President Putin.

They had kept him in power,

unchallenged, for 15 years.

Some of them had been dissidents back in the 1970s

and had been powerfully influenced by the

science fiction writings of

the Strugatsky brothers.

20 years later, when Russia fell

apart after the end of communism, they rose up

and took control of the media.

And they used it to manipulate

the electorate on a vast scale.

For them, reality was just something that

could be manipulated and shaped into anything

you wanted it to be.

GLASS THUDS:

But then a technologist emerged

who went much further.

And his ideas would become central to

Putin's grip on power.

He was called Vladislav Surkov.

Surkov came originally from the

theatre world and those who have

studied his career say that what he did was take

avant-garde ideas from the theatre and bring

them into the heart of politics.

Surkov's aim was not just to manipulate people

but to go deeper and play with, and undermine

their very perception of the world so they are

never sure what is really happening.

Surkov turned Russian politics into

a bewildering, constantly

changing piece of theatre.

He used Kremlin money to sponsor

all kinds of groups - from mass

anti-fascist youth organisations,

to the very opposite - neo-Nazi skinheads.

And liberal human rights groups who

then attacked the government.

Surkov even backed whole

political parties that were

opposed to President Putin.

But the key thing was that Surkov

then let it be known that this

was what he was doing.

Which meant that no-one was sure

what was real or what was fake

in modern Russia.

As one journalist put it,

"It's a strategy of power

that keeps any opposition

"constantly confused -

"a ceaseless shape-shifting that is unstoppable

"because it is indefinable."

Meanwhile, real power was elsewhere -

hidden away behind the stage,

exercised without anyone seeing it.

And then the same thing seemed

to start happening in the West.

By now it was becoming ever more clear

that the system had deep flaws.

Every month there were new revelations,

of most of the banks' involvement

in global corruption,

of massive tax avoidance by

all the major corporations,

of the secret surveillance of everyone's e-mails

by the National Security Agency.

Yet no-one was prosecuted,

except for a few people at the lowest levels.

And behind it all,

the massive inequality kept on growing.

Yet the structure of power remained the same.

Nothing ever changed,

because nothing could be allowed

to destabilise the system.

But then the shape-shifting began.

CHEERING:

Thank you very much. So nice.

So amazing. So amazing.

- WOMAN:
We love you.

- What? That's OK.

I love you more, OK?

CHEERING:

The campaign that Donald Trump ran

was unlike anything before in politics.

Nothing was fixed.

What he said, who he attacked

and how he attacked them was

constantly changing and shifting.

Trump attacked his Republican rivals

as all being part of a broken and corrupt system -

a politics where everyone could be bought,

using words that could have

come from the Occupy movement.

You've also donated to several

Democratic candidates,

Hillary Clinton included, Nancy Pelosi.

You explained away those

donations saying you did that

to get business-related favours.

And you said recently, "When you give,

"they do whatever the hell you want them to do."

- You'd better believe it.

- So what specifically did they do?

If I ask them, if I need them...

You know, most of the people on this stage,

I've given to, just so you

understand, a lot of money.

I will tell you that our system is broken.

I give to many people.

Before this, before two months

ago, I was a businessman.

I give to everybody. When they call, I give.

And you know what, when I

need something from them,

two years later, three years later, I call them.

- They are there for me. - So what did you get?

- And that's a broken system.

But at the same time, Trump used the language

of the extreme racist right in America,

connecting with people's darkest fears -

pushing them and bringing those

fears out into the open.

Get the f*** out of here!

Our country, motherf***er!

Our country!

Proud f***ing American!

Made in the USA, b*tch!

Made in the f***ing USA!

Don't f***ing come back, burrito b*tch!

Go f***ing right back to jail, motherf***er!

Build that f***ing wall for me!

Trump! Donald Trump!

Rate this script:5.0 / 1 vote