HyperNormalisation Page #3

RUSSIAN SONG PLAYS

Those who ran the Soviet Union had

believed that they could plan

and manage a new kind of socialist society.

But they had discovered that it was impossible

to control and predict everything

and the plan had run out of control.

But rather than reveal this, the

technocrats began to pretend

that everything was still going according to plan.

And what emerged instead was a

fake version of the society.

The Soviet Union became a

society where everyone knew

that what their leaders said was not real

because they could see with their own eyes

that the economy was falling apart.

But everybody had to play along

and pretend that it WAS real

because no-one could imagine any alternative.

One Soviet writer called it "hypernormalisation".

You were so much a part of the system

that it was impossible to see beyond it.

The fakeness was hypernormal.

TANNOY ANNOUNCEMENT IN RUSSIAN

In this stagnant world, two brothers -

called Arkady and Boris Strugatsky -

became the inspiration of a

growing new dissident movement.

They weren't politicians, they

were science fiction writers,

and in their stories,

they expressed the strange mood that was rising up

as the Soviet Empire collapsed.

Their most famous book was called Roadside Picnic.

It is set in a world that seems like the present,

except there is a zone that has

been created by an alien force.

People, known as "stalkers", go into the zone.

They find that nothing is what it seems,

that reality changes minute by minute.

Shadows go the wrong way.

There are hidden forces that twist your body

and change the way you think and feel.

The picture the Strugatskys gave

was of a world where nothing was fixed.

Where reality - both what you

saw and what you believed -

had become shifting and unstable.

And in 1979, the film director Andrei Tarkovsky

made a film that was based on Roadside Picnic.

He called it Stalker.

WIND WHISTLES:

I, Ronald Reagan, do solemnly swear...

...that I will faithfully execute

the office of president of the United States.

...that I will faithfully execute

the office of president of the United States.

The new president of America

had a new vision of the world.

It wasn't the harsh realism of

Henry Kissinger any longer,

it was different -

it was a simple, moral crusade,

where America had a special destiny to fight evil

and to make the world a better place.

The places and the periods in

which man has known freedom

are few and far between -

just scattered moments on the span of time.

And most of those moments have been ours.

The American people have a genius

for great and unselfish deeds.

Into the hands of America,

God has placed the destiny

of an afflicted mankind.

God bless America.

But this crusade was going to lead Reagan

to come face-to-face with

Henry Kissinger's legacy...

...and, above all, the vengeful

fury of President Assad of Syria.

EXPLOSION:

Israel was now determined

to finally destroy the power of the Palestinians.

And, in 1982, they sent a massive army

to encircle the Palestinian camps in the Lebanon.

Do you know... Do you know

how strong the Israelis are?

Do you know how many tanks

they have outside Beirut?

Do you know how strong they are?

HE TRANSLATES:

That means "We are not ready to surrender".

Young, young, young!

NEARBY EXPLOSIONS

Keep going!

Dashed into this building here

because the PLO guys with us

expect that, sooner or later,

there will be a huge explosion.

There've been several of these

in the last few minutes.

As you can see,

there's enormous damage in all

the buildings round here.

EXPLOSION:

Quick, quick!

DISTANT EXPLOSIONS

Two months later, thousands

of Palestinian refugees

were massacred in the camps.

It horrified the world.

But what was even more shocking

was that Israel had allowed it to happen.

Its troops had stood by and watched

as a Christian Lebanese faction

murdered the Palestinians.

This was the first of the massacres

we discovered yesterday.

Now, 24 hours later, the stench here is appalling.

But the effects on the Israelis

of what their Christian allies did here

and in dozens of other places around this camp

are going to be immense.

There's always been a risk of such

massacres if Christian militiamen

were allowed to come into Palestinian camps,

and the Israelis seem to have done nothing

to prevent them coming into this one.

In the face of the horror and the growing chaos,

President Reagan was forced to act.

He announced that American

marines would come to Beirut

to lead a peacekeeping force.

Reagan insisted that the troops were neutral.

But President Assad was convinced

that there was another reality.

He saw the troops as part

of the growing conspiracy

between America and Israel to divide

the Middle East into factions

and destroy the power of the Arabs.

Assad decided to get the Americans

out of the Middle East.

And to do this, he made an alliance

with the new revolutionary force

of Ayatollah Khomeini's Iran.

And what Khomeini could bring to Assad

was an extraordinary new weapon

that he had just created.

It was called it "the poor man's atomic bomb".

Ayatollah Khomeini had come

to power two years before

as the leader of the Iranian revolution.

But his hold on power was precarious,

and Khomeini had developed a new

idea of how to fight his enemies

and defend the revolution.

Khomeini told his followers that

they could destroy themselves

in order to save the revolution

providing that, in the process,

they killed as many enemies

around them as possible.

This was completely new,

because the Koran specifically prohibited suicide.

In the past, you became a

martyr on the battlefield

because God chose the time

and place of your death.

But Khomeini changed this.

He did it by going back to one of

the central rituals of Shia Islam.

MUSIC PLAYS:

Every year, Shi'ites march in a procession

mourning the sacrifice of their founder, Husayn.

As they do, they whip themselves,

symbolically re-enacting Husayn's suffering.

Khomeini said that the ultimate act of penitence

was not just to whip yourself,

but to kill yourself...

...providing it was for the

greater good of the revolution.

In the name of God, the

compassionate, the merciful,

good afternoon.

"An Iraqi Soviet-made MiG-23 was shot down

"by the air-force jet fighters

of the Islamic Republic

"over the north-western Iranian

border region of Marivan

"at 10.08 hours local time, Saturday,"

said the Joint Staff Commands

communique numbered 1710.

Khomeini had mobilised this force

when the country was attacked by Iraq.

Iran faced almost certain defeat

because Iraq had far superior weapons,

many of them supplied by America.

So, the revolutionaries took

tens of thousands of young boys

out of schools, put them on buses

and sent them to the front line.

CHANTING:

Their job was to walk through

the enemies' minefields,

deliberately blowing themselves

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