The Ends Justify the Means

Part 1 of the BBC series Power of Nightmares explains the development and progression of our biggest nightmare: terrorism. While you can simply wake up from a nightmare it seems as if we can’t escape terrorist threats, yet this series proves that terrorism is as fantastical as the boogeyman, which relies on popular myth more than reality. The main people that carry out this fantastical story that we are constantly at threat from evil forces come from two opposing political groups, the United State’s Neo-Conservative party and the extreme Islamist Jihad.

This series traces back to the 1960’s when two scholars created ideologies that would take on a life of their own far beyond their years, Leo Strauss and Sayyid Qutb. While Strauss influenced the founding members of Neo-Conservative party Qutb began a lifestyle that inspired radical Islamist leaders. This film goes back and forth from one ideology to the other over the course of 20 years. This technique made following the plot a little difficult in term of location, yet it drew up a nice timeline approach. In the early 1960’s with liberalism on the rise Strauss believed that America was beginning to collapse from moral decay, similarly to Qutb’s opinion that Western capitalist infiltration to Egyptian culture resulted in the collapse of traditional Islamic values.

The film continuously pointed out that both groups and their leaders rose to power based on emphasizing fear. These leaders no longer spoke of promising dreams, but instead on protecting us from evil threats (ones which we cannot see). These threats are nothing more than complete fabrications used to scare us into our isolated worlds where we are sheltered from the truth, keeping us in place and them in power. Nevertheless, the harsh reality that we are left with is two radical political groups that have bought into their own garbage. This was the most interesting point they made in Part 1 was that after all this time these groups began to justify their own immoral behaviors, like killing and lying, in effort to continue their own sociopolitical agenda. These groups are truly convinced that they are right and every other way is wrong, and they will stop at nothing to become the dominant power. Feeding us lies and killing the innocent is good reason for them because the ends always justify the means.