HyperNormalisation Page #4

up in order to open gaps

that would allow the Iranian

army to pass through unharmed.

It was organised suicide on a vast scale.

This human sacrifice was commemorated

in giant cemeteries across the country.

Fountains flowing with blood red-water

glorified this new kind of martyrdom.

And it was this new idea -

of an unstoppable human weapon -

that President Assad took from Khomeini,

and brought to the West for the first time.

But, as it travelled,

it would mutate into something even more deadly.

Instead of just killing yourself,

you would take explosives with

you into the heart of the enemy

and then blow yourself up,

taking dozens or even hundreds along with you.

It would become known as "suicide bombing".

In October 1983, two suicide bombers

drove trucks into the US

marine barracks in Beirut.

It was seeing something move

that took me out of my trance.

And then I recognised, "Oh, yes,

marines were in that building.

"A lot of marines were in that building."

And that's when I ran down and...

And it was a black... black marine.

He looked white.

The dust had just covered him.

The massive explosions killed 241 Americans.

The bombers were members of a new militant group

that no-one had heard of.

They called themselves Hezbollah

and, although many of them were Iranian,

they were very much under the control of Syria

and the Syrian intelligence agencies.

President Assad was using them as

his proxies to attack America.

Whoever carried out yesterday's bombings,

Shia Muslim fanatics,

devotees of the Ayatollah Khomeini, or whatever,

it is Syria who profits politically.

The most significant fact is that

the dissidents live and work

with Syrian protection.

So, it is to Syria rather than to the

dissident group's guiding light,

Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran, that

we must look for an explanation

of the group's activities.

Destabilisation is Syria's

Middle-Eastern way of reminding

the world that Syria

must not be left out of plans

for the future of the area.

There are no words that can

express our sorrow and grief

for the loss of those splendid young men

and the injury to so many others.

These deeds make so evident the bestial nature

of those who would assume power

if they could have their way

and drive us out of that area.

But despite his words, within four months,

President Reagan withdrew all the

American troops from the Lebanon.

The Secretary of State George Shultz explained.

"We became paralysed by the

complexity that we faced," he said.

So, the Americans turned and left.

For President Assad, it was

an extraordinary achievement.

He was the only Arab leader to

have defeated the Americans

and forced them to leave the Middle East.

He had done it by using the

new force of suicide bombing.

A force that, once unleashed,

was going to spread with unstoppable power.

But at this point, both Assad and the Iranians

thought that they could control it.

And what gave it this extraordinary power

was that it held out the dream

of transcending the corruptions of the world

and entering a new and better realm.

TRANSLATION:

One should defend the realm of Islam and Muslims

against heretics and invaders.

And to fulfil this duty, one

should even sacrifice one's life.

We believe that martyrs can overlook

our deeds from the other world.

It means that, after death,

the martyr lives and can still witness this world.

By the middle of the 1980s,

the banks were rising up

and becoming ever more powerful in America.

What had started ten years before in New York,

the idea that the financial

system could run society,

was spreading.

But unlike older systems of

power, it was mostly invisible.

A writer called William Gibson

tried to dramatise what was happening

in a powerful, imaginative

way, in a series of novels.

Gibson had noticed how the

banks and the new corporations

were beginning to link themselves

together through computer systems.

What they were creating was a

series of giant networks of

information that were invisible to ordinary people

and to politicians.

But those networks gave the corporations

extraordinary new powers of control.

'Good morning. South-West Development.

May I help you?'

Gibson gave this new world a name.

He called it "cyberspace"

and his novels described a future

that was dangerous and frightening.

Hackers could literally enter

into cyberspace and as they did,

they travelled through systems

that were so powerful

that they could reach out and crush

intruders by destroying their minds.

In cyberspace, there were no laws

and no politicians to protect you.

Just raw, brutal corporate power.

But then, a strange thing happened.

A new group of visionaries in America

took Gibson's idea of a hidden, secret world

and transformed it into

something completely different.

They turned it into a dream of a new utopia.

They were the technological

utopians who were rising up

on the West Coast of America.

They turned Gibson's idea on its head.

Instead of cyberspace being a frightening place,

dominated by powerful corporations,

they reinvented it as the very opposite.

A new, safe world where radical

dreams could come true.

Ten years before, faced by the

complexity of real politics,

the radicals had given up on the

idea of changing the world.

But now, the computer utopians saw, in cyberspace,

an alternative reality.

A place they could retreat to away

from the harsh right-wing politics

that now dominated Reagan's America.

The roots of this vision lay

back in the counterculture

of the 1960s, and, above all, with LSD.

We've got some more acid over

here if you want to go ahead.

Many of those who had taken LSD in the '60s

were convinced that it was

more than just another drug,

that it opened human perception

and allowed people to see new realities

that were normally hidden from them.

See, the ones that have white

in them are really great.

SHE GIGGLES:

I feel like a rabbit.

It freed them from the narrow,

limited view of the world

that was imposed on them by

politicians and those in power.

In the United States, in the

next, five, ten, 15 years,

you're going to see more and more

people taking LSD and making it

a part of their lives, so there will

be an LSD country within 15 years.

An LSD society, there will be less interest

in, obviously, warfare,

in power politics.

You know, politics today is a

disease, it's a real addiction.

Politics, politics, politics, politics.

Don't politick, don't vote -

these are old men's games.

Impotent and senile old man that want to put you

onto their old chess games of war and power.

20 years later, the new networks

of machines seemed to offer

a way to construct a real alternate reality.

Not just one that was chemically induced,

but a space that actually existed

in a parallel dimension to the real world.

And like with acid,

cyberspace could be a place where you

would be liberated from the old,

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