HyperNormalisation Page #2

Shut up.

Shut up!

One of them wrote of that time,

"It was the mood of the era

"and the revolution was deferred indefinitely.

"And while we were dozing, the money crept in."

SOBBING:

What's your date of birth, Larry?

But one of the people who did

understand how to use this new power

was Donald Trump.

Trump realised that there was now no future

in building housing for ordinary people,

because all the government grants had gone.

But he saw there were other ways

to get vast amounts of money out of the state.

Trump started to buy up

derelict buildings in New York

and he announced that he was

going to transform them

into luxury hotels and apartments.

But in return, he negotiated the biggest tax break

in New York's history, worth 160 million.

The city had to agree because they were desperate,

and the banks, seeing a new opportunity,

also started to lend him money.

And Donald Trump began to transform

New York into a city for the rich,

while he paid practically nothing.

At the very same time, in 1975,

there was a confrontation between

two powerful men in Damascus,

the capital of Syria.

One was Henry Kissinger,

the US Secretary of State.

The other was the President

of Syria, Hafez al-Assad.

The battle between the two men

was going to have profound

consequences for the world.

And like in New York, it

was going to be a struggle

between the old idea of using

politics to change the world

and a new idea that you could run

the world as a stable system.

President Assad dominated Syria.

The country was full of giant images

and statues that glorified him.

He was brutal and ruthless,

killing or imprisoning anyone

he suspected of being a threat.

But Assad believed that the

violence was for a purpose.

He wanted to find a way of

uniting the Arab countries

and using that power to stand up to the West.

Four,

three,

two,

one.

Kissinger was also tough and ruthless.

He had started in the 1950s

as an expert in the theory of nuclear strategy.

What was called "the delicate balance of terror."

It was the system that ran the Cold War.

Both sides believed that if they attacked,

the other side would immediately

launch their missiles

and everyone would be annihilated.

Kissinger had been one of the

models for the character

of Dr. Strangelove in Stanley Kubrick's film.

Mr. President, I would not rule out the chance

to preserve a nucleus of human specimens.

It would be quite easy.

At the bottom of some of our deeper mineshafts.

Henry was not a warm, friendly,

modest, jovial sort of person.

He was thought of as one of the more...

...anxious, temperamental, self-conscious,

ambitious, inconsiderate people at Harvard.

Kissinger saw himself as a hard realist.

He had no time for the emotional

turmoil of political ideologies.

He believed that history had always

really been a struggle for power

between groups and nations.

But what Kissinger took from the Cold War

was a way of seeing the world

as an interconnected system,

and his aim was to keep that system in balance

and prevent it from falling into chaos.

I believe that with all the

dislocations we now experience,

there also exists an extraordinary opportunity

to form, for the first time in

history, a truly global society

carried up by the principle of interdependence,

and if we act wisely, and with vision,

I think we can look back to all this turmoil

as the birth pangs of a more

creative and better system.

If we miss the opportunity, I

think there's going to be chaos.

The flight has been delayed, we understand now.

Kissinger will be arriving here

about an hour and a half from now,

so we'll just have the press informed

and then we'll stay in contact with you...

And it was this idea that

Kissinger set out to impose

on the chaotic politics of the Middle East.

But to manage it,

he knew that he was going to have to

deal with President Assad of Syria.

President Assad was convinced

that there would only ever be

a real and lasting peace

between the Arabs and Israel

if the Palestinian refugees were

allowed to return to their homeland.

Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians

were living in exile in Syria,

as well as in the Lebanon and Jordan.

Have you found that the

Palestinians here want to integrate

with the Syrians at all?

Oh, no. No, never.

They don't want...

Not here or neither in

Lebanon or in Jordan, never.

No, because they want to stay

as a whole, as... Palestinian.

As... They call themselves, "Those Who Go Back" -

"al-a'iduun", you say in Arabic.

Assad also believed that such a peace

would strengthen the Arab world.

But Kissinger thought that strengthening the Arabs

would destabilise his balance of power.

So, he set out to do the very opposite -

to fracture the power of the Arab countries,

by dividing them and breaking their alliances,

so they would keep each other in check.

Kissinger now played a double game.

Or as he termed it, "constructive ambiguity".

In a series of meetings, he persuaded Egypt

to sign a separate agreement with Israel.

But at the same time, he led Assad to believe

that he was working for a wider peace agreement,

one that WOULD include the Palestinians.

In reality, the Palestinians were ignored.

They were irrelevant to the structural balance

of the global system.

The hallmark of Kissinger's thinking

about international politics

is its structural design.

Everything is always connected

in his mind to everything else.

But his first thoughts are on that level,

on this structural global balance of power level.

And as he addresses questions of human dignity,

human survival, human freedom...

...I think they tend to come into his mind

as an adjunct of the play of

nations at the power game.

When Assad found out the truth, it was too late.

In a series of confrontations

with Kissinger in Damascus,

Assad raged about this treachery.

He told Kissinger that what he had done

would release demons hidden under

the surface of the Arab world.

Kissinger described their meetings.

"Assad's controlled fury," he wrote,

"was all the more impressive for its eerily cold,

"seemingly unemotional, demeanour."

Assad now retreated.

He started to build a giant palace

that loomed over Damascus...

...and his belief that it would be

possible to transform the Arab world

began to fade.

A British journalist, who knew Assad, wrote...

"Assad's optimism has gone.

"A trust in the future has gone.

"What has emerged instead is

a brutal, vengeful Assad,

"who believes in nothing except revenge."

The original dream of the Soviet Union

had been to create a glorious new world.

A world where not only the society,

but the people themselves would be transformed.

They would become new and

better kinds of human beings.

But by the 1980s, it was clear

that the dream had failed.

WOMAN GASPS:

WOMAN SPEAKS RUSSIAN

The Soviet Union became instead

a society where no-one believed in anything

or had any vision of the future.

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