HyperNormalisation Page #7

to describe what had happened.

TRANSLATION:

The family were asleep and my wife

was, that day, tied down to the bed

because she had a slipped disc.

I tried to rescue the children

and the house started to collapse,

as you can see.

And the bombs started to land.

They concentrated on the children's room

so that they would kill all the children.

Our small adopted daughter was killed

and two of our children were injured.

But, yet again, Gaddafi might have been lying.

Ever since then,

there have been rumours that his

adopted daughter actually survived.

But many other children were killed in the raid

because the American bombing was so inaccurate.

Gaddafi realised that the

attention of the whole world

was now focused on him

and he grabbed the moment to promote

his own revolutionary theory,

The Third Way, as a global

alternative to democracy.

TRANSLATION:

I feel that I'm really responsible

for conveying the Third Way

theory and the Green Book

to the rising generations, to the

young American and British people,

so that we can rescue America and Britain

and these generations of young

people from this theory,

this electoral party theory

which enabled an imbecile like Reagan

to rule the mightiest power on Earth

and use it to destroy other people's homes

and enabled a harlot like Thatcher

to rule a great nation like Britain.

MAN:

Wow, look at that. What the heck is that?

Oh, my God, look at that.

Holy crap!

It's just moving really slowly. Wow!

- Look, look, look! Come here, come here!

- What is it doing?

What the heck?!

Guys, it's...

- Whoa!

- Oh, my gosh!

Wow!

- What is happening?

- Dude, what is happening?!

- What is going on?

- Oh, my gosh!

- Oh, my God, guys!

- Guys, is that a freaking UFO?

- Wait, can you get a good video?

- What is it? - What the hell?

In the 1980s, more and more

people in the United States

reported seeing unexplained

objects and lights in the sky.

At the same time, investigators

who believed in UFOs

revealed that they had discovered

top-secret government documents

that stated that alien craft had visited Earth.

The documents had been hidden for 20 years

and they seemed to prove that

there had been a giant cover-up.

But, actually, the reality was even stranger.

The American Government might

have been making it all up,

that they had created a fake conspiracy

to deliberately mislead the population.

The lights that people imagined were UFOs

may, in reality, have been

new high-technology weapons

that the US Government were testing.

The government had developed the weapons

because they, in turn,

imagined that the Soviet Union

was far stronger than it was

and still wanted to conquer the world.

The government wanted to keep the weapons secret,

but they couldn't always hide

their appearance in the skies

so it is alleged that they chose

a number of people to use

to spread the rumour that these

were really alien visitations.

One of those chosen was called Paul Bennewitz

who lived outside a giant air base in New Mexico

and had noticed strange things going on.

Years later,

I sat down with Paul at dinner

and told Paul exactly that everything we did

was a sanctioned counterintelligence

operation to convince him

that what he was seeing was UFOs

and that what we didn't want him to know was

that he had tapped into something on the base

and we didn't want him to ever disclose that.

We kind of planted the seed in Paul

that what he was seeing and what he was hearing

and what he was collecting was, in fact,

probably, maybe, UFOs.

Bennewitz and others chosen by the agency

were, it is alleged, given a

series of forged documents.

Many of them were top-secret memos by the military

describing sightings of

unidentified aerial vehicles.

The documents spread like wildfire

and they formed the basis for

the wave of belief in UFOs

that would spread through America in the 1990s.

- What the f*** is that?

- That's a...

That's crazy, bro.

Is that that space, uh...?

And it also fuelled the wider growing belief

that governments lied to you -

that conspiracies were real.

What the Reagan administration were doing,

both with Colonel Gaddafi and with the UFOs,

was a blurring of fact and fiction

but it was part of an even broader programme.

The President's advisers had given it a name -

they called it "perception management"

and it became a central part

of the American Government

during the 1980s.

The aim was to tell dramatic stories

that grabbed the public imagination,

not just about the Middle East,

but about Central America

and the Soviet Union

and it didn't matter if the

stories were true or not,

providing they distracted

people and you, the politician,

from having to deal with

the intractable complexities of the real world.

Reality became less and less

of an important factor in American politics.

It wasn't what was real that was driving anything

or the facts driving anything.

It was how you could turn those

facts or twist those facts

or even make up the facts to

make your opponent look bad.

So, perception management became a device

and the facts could be twisted.

Anything could be anything.

It becomes how can you

manipulate the American people?

And, in the process, reality becomes what?

Reality becomes simply something

to play with to achieve that end.

Reality is not important in this context.

Reality is simply something that you handle.

But something was about to happen

that would demonstrate dramatically

just how far the American Government

had detached from reality.

The Soviet Empire was about to implode.

And no-one, none of the politicians,

or the journalists,

or the think tank experts,

or the economists,

or the academics saw it coming.

That's it! Whoo!

Get ready to work out.

GUNSHOTS:

The collapse of the Soviet Union

also had a powerful effect on the West.

For many, it symbolised the

final failure of the dream

that politics could be used

to build a new kind of world.

What was going to emerge instead

was a new system that had nothing

to do with politics.

A system whose aim was not

to try and change things,

but rather, to manage a post-political world.

One of the first people to

describe this dramatic change

was a left-wing German political

thinker called Ulrich Beck.

Beck said that any politician who

believed that they could take

control of society, and drive it forward to build

a better future, was now seen as dangerous.

In the past, politicians might

have been able to do this.

But now they were faced with what

he called "a runaway world."

Where things were so complex and interconnected,

and modern technologies so potentially dangerous

that it was impossible to predict

the outcomes of anything you did.

The catalogue of environmental

disasters proved this.

Politicians would have to give

up any idea of trying to change

the world.

Instead, their new aim would be

to try and predict the dangers

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