HyperNormalisation Page #15

F*** you! I love my country!

Yeah! I'll f*** like at least

ten of you up in one session,

you f***ing p*ssy!

Many of the facts that Trump asserted

were also completely untrue.

But Trump didn't care.

He and his audience knew that much of what he said

bore little relationship to reality.

This meant that Trump defeated journalism -

because the journalists' central belief was that

their job was to expose lies and assert the truth.

With Trump, this became irrelevant.

Not surprisingly, Vladimir Putin admired this.

MAN SPEAKS RUSSIAN

The liberals were outraged by Trump.

But they expressed their anger in cyberspace,

so it had no effect -

because the algorithms made sure

that they only spoke to people

who already agreed with them.

Instead, ironically, their waves

of angry messages and tweets

benefitted the large corporations

who ran the social media platforms.

One online analyst put it simply,

"Angry people click more."

It meant that the radical fury

that came like waves across the internet

no longer had the power to change the world.

Instead, it was becoming a fuel

that was feeding the new systems of power

and making them ever more powerful.

But none of the liberals could possibly imagine

that Donald Trump could ever win the nomination.

It was just a giant pantomime.

Then of course there's Donald Trump.

Donald Trump has been saying

that he will run for president

as a Republican, which is surprising,

since I just assumed he was running as a joke.

LAUGHTER:

Donald Trump often appears

on Fox, which is ironic,

because a fox often appears

on Donald Trump's head.

LAUGHTER:

Donald Trump owns the Miss USA Pageant,

which is great for Republicans

because it will streamline their

search for a vice president.

LAUGHTER:

Donald Trump said recently he has a

great relationship with the blacks.

Though unless the Blacks are

a family of white people,

I bet he's mistaken.

LAUGHTER:

But underneath the liberal disdain,

both Donald Trump in America,

and Vladislav Surkov in Russia

had realised the same thing -

that the version of reality

that politics presented

was no longer believable,

that the stories politicians told

their people about the world

had stopped making sense.

And in the face of that, you

could play with reality,

constantly shifting and changing,

and in the process, further undermine and weaken

the old forms of power.

CHILDREN SING:

And there was another force that

was about to dramatically reveal

just how weak politics had become in the West -

Syria.

CHILDREN SING:

The attack happened here at

a central police station

in Damascus.

Police say the bomber came up the stairs,

police then opened fire,

and then police say he detonated the explosives.

And the damage is here to see.

Behind me, the pockmarked walls

where the ball bearings hit.

Blood splattered on the walls.

And the force of the blast

caused walls to collapse.

And everything is topsy-turvy,

everything destroyed.

By now Syria was being torn

apart by a horrific civil war.

What had started as part of the Arab Spring

had turned into a vicious battle to the death

between Bashar Assad and his opponents.

And at the heart of the conflict

was the force that his father

had first brought to the West -

suicide bombing.

THEY SPEAK IN OWN LANGUAGE

Back in the 1980s

Bashar Assad's father had seen suicide bombing

as a weapon he could use

to force the Americans out of the Middle East.

But over the next 30 years

it had shifted and mutated

into something that had now ended

up doing the very opposite -

tearing the Arab world apart.

Hafez al-Assad's dream of a

powerful and united Arab world

was now destroyed.

In Iraq, extremist Sunni groups

had used suicide bombing

as a way to start a sectarian war.

And now groups like ISIS brought

the same techniques into Syria

to attack not just Assad's

son but his fellow Shi'ites.

And like his father, Bashar Assad retaliated

with a vengeful fury.

And the country fell apart.

MAN:

Allahu Akbar.

WHOOSHING:

Allahu Akbar. Allahu Akbar.

ROARING:

My fellow Americans...

tonight I want to talk to you about Syria -

why it matters and where we go from here.

Faced by the war, western

politicians were bewildered.

They insisted Bashar Assad was evil.

But then it turned out that

his enemies were more evil

and more horrific than him.

The question before the House today

is how we keep the British

people safe from the threat

posed by ISIL.

This is not about whether

we want to fight terrorism,

it's about how best we do that.

So Britain, America and France

decided to bomb the terrorist threat.

But the effect of that was

to help keep Assad in power.

WHOOSHING:

CLATTERING:

Then it became more confusing.

Suddenly, the Russians intervened.

President Putin sent hundreds

of planes and combat troops

to support Assad.

But no-one knew what their underlying aim was.

They seemed to be using a strategy that

Vladislav Surkov had developed in the Ukraine.

He called it non-linear warfare.

It was a new kind of war - where you never know

what the enemy are really up to.

MAN:

Allahu Akbar.

The underlying aim, Surkov

said, was not to win the war,

but to use the conflict to create a constant state

of destabilised perception -

in order to manage and control.

MAN BREATHES HEAVILY

Allahu Akbar.

ORCHESTRA PLAYS:

In March 2016 the Russians suddenly

announced with a great fanfare

that they were leaving Syria.

And a concert was held in the ruins of Palmyra

to celebrate the withdrawal.

But in reality, the Russians never left.

They are still there,

and still no-one knows what they want.

HE SPEAKS IN OWN LANGUAGE

And within Syria there was

a new Islamist ideologist

who was determined to exploit

the growing uncertainties

in Europe and America.

He was called Abu Musab al-Suri -

the Syrian.

HE SPEAKS IN OWN LANGUAGE

Al-Suri had originally worked with

Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan,

but he had turned against him.

Al-Suri gave lectures that had a powerful effect

on the Islamist movement.

He argued that bin Laden had been wrong

to attack the West head on,

because it created a massive military response

that had almost destroyed Islamism.

Instead, al-Suri said,

independent groups or individuals

should stage random, small-scale attacks

on civilians in Europe and America.

The aim was to spread fear,

uncertainty and doubt -

and undermine the already failing

authority of western politicians.

The effect of the attacks

shocked Europe and America

and gave powerful force to the new

politics of uncertainty and anxiety.

I'm sure that you, with me,

share the absolute horror and total revulsion

at what happened in Paris last Friday.

And I'm afraid there is,

and we have to be honest and frank about this

and talk about these things without being fearful,

there is a problem with some of the

Muslim community in this country.

There is a problem. And we

have to be honest about it.

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