HyperNormalisation (2016)

Thought provoking illustration of a moment in time and how the events lead up to it, both as poignant as they are eclectic, contribute to the current social and economic climate of today.

The moment that Adam Curtis names Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin along suicide bombers, waves of refugees and Brexit among some of the things that "undermine the stability of the world" we know that this is just another leftwing, neoliberalist propaganda "documentary", created to demonize Rusia, Iran and all the enemies of the Neocon world Order.Of course Mr. Curtis never mentions of the fact that the biggest culprits of the destruction of the stability of the world in the past eight years are Obama, Hillary Clinton as US secretary of state, and the CIA, which in less than a decade have managed to create ISIS and completely destroy Libya, Siria, Yemen and topple the governments of Egypt, Tunisia, with the CIA backed and planned "Arab Spring". The Obama / Clinton warmongering "legacy" far exceeds the destruction created by G W Bush and his neocon war on Iraq: During his 8 years of terror, Obumma dropped 26,171 bombs on wedding parties, funerals, kid's soccer games, hospitals, schools, people in their homes and walking their streets, and farmers tilling their fields in seven countries: Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan. Some Nobel Peace prize winner.In the rest of this film, Mr. Curtis tries to explain "how the world got to this point" by coming up with some lame theory of "hypernormalization" that claims that the (nameless) people in power have been fooling all of us, even those who are opposed to the system by creating a sanitized version of reality.Mr. Curtis is partially right, and ironically, he and his pathetic, pop-music driven propaganda documentaries are themselves a part of the fake news reality constructed by the neoliberalists in power, and their channels of brainwashing mass media like the BBC, CNN, NBC, etc etc This documentary wastes no time to take jabs Donald Trump, by coming up with some ridiculous links between NYC bankers and some inane seventies NYC underground artists as if this was the start of the fake news and fake reality.The truth is that the imperialist propaganda machine has been running since the beginning of the 20th century.As expected, Mr. Curtis goes on to paint Syrian president Assad's father Hafez al-Assad (president from 1971 to 2000) AS some kind of evil dictator, and to blame him, Iran and Egypt for the creation of radical islamists. This is completely ridiculous, as award-winning geopolitical analyst William Engdahl has written in his many books; most terrorist organizations in the Middle East are the descendants of the CIA- backed Muslim Brotherhood after WWII, as used for example in Afghanistan against the Russians in the form of the Taliban. The animosity between the muslims and the west started way back at the beginning of the century when the British were trying to destroy the Ottoman Empire.Let's not forget that at one point or another, Osama BinLaden, Saddam Hussein and the Shah of Iran were all CIA / US imperialist puppets.In this ridiculous documentary, Adam Curtis refuses to blame the real culprits of the never-ending warmongering around the word.. US imperialism, the CIA and the Neocons that run the US government and its policies, and the puppets of evil.. Bush, Blair, Obama, NATO, etcHe does the best that he can to demonize those who side with Russia (like Syria and Iran) and oppose the neocon / neoliberal world order.This film clearly shows that Adam Curtis is nothing but a coward, neoliberal propagandist.

It is a mis-interpretation of the past, if not outright status-quo propaganda. The documentary has these enormous suppositions that come from.. out of someone's ass perhaps? Um, excuse me, I grew up in the eighties and nineties, and to put a blanket statement over the entire western culture that everyone gave up hope of better things in the nineties is utter farcical bull crap. Really? The stock market was booming, (due to interest rate manipulation by the fed) the internet and bio-pharma boom was happening, and this film states that "everyone gave up ideas of a better future???" It then plays some movie clips over and over again and subsequently shows 9/11 footage as supposed obvious conclusion to fear and foreboding in America (and it seems the west in general) and the terror attacks were just a natural outcome from all of that? The movie even begins talking about NYC in the seventies running out of money and them waiting for the banks to come in and buy their bonds.. this had an inkling of interest for me, based on my understandings of the way the banks in America, especially after the forming of the federal reserve in 1913, behaved. They created, supported by Keynesian economists, the idea of the "business cycle." A complete sham that enormous amounts of westerner's and even the world in general, believe in. The business cycle is nothing more than the regular bailing out of the banks. Look no further than the GFC to confirm this.The Fed manipulates and lowers interest rates, the speculative markets and housing skyrocket, and then, low and behold, it all crashes! What to do? Punish the bankers that made shoddy investments? Throw any of them in jail? NO! Pay them gobs and gobs of taxpayer money. Sink the nation further into debt and provide more interest revenue streams to the banks, as they simultaneously proceed to do it all over again! Lower rates, the market soars, the bubbles inflate! Look at Deutsch Bank: 65 TRILLION in derivatives and there stock valuation of such a supposedly first class investing institution is less than TWITTER!! The derivatives they sit on top of equal 19 times the GDP of the most powerful market share of the EU: Germany!! Think of the massive jenga stack/bubble that is. Amazing.. here we go again, its not a matter of IF but WHEN this thing is going to blow.What this FILM really misses is the financial ties to everything. Money runs the world and the FED with its criminal monopoly of the US dollar is on of the kings. This massive crash in 2008 happens, we QE and lower rates and... no hyper inflation! How come? Man, if it was just printing money and lowering rates, all of the banana republics and African dictatorships would be the most powerful and wealthy nations in the world! How do we do it? Well this film alludes to it in the beginning: it had something to do with that massive war criminal, Henry Kissinger.This is the man who colluded with McNamara and Nixon to bomb Cambodia back to the stone age and created a power vacuum there that led to the genocide and slaughter of 2million people. Nice bit that was huh? Pol Pot running around and having his henchmen photograph and then systematically torture and murder most of the population. Forgot to mention that little feather in Kissinger's cap. But Kissinger also did some other things that are allowing us to export our inflation today to the rest of the world. He created the Petro-dollar cycle. You see, Nixon was at war in Vietnam, things were going well, slaughter was happening, the military industrial complex was making fat green. But there was a limit to it all: the pesky gold standard. You were limited by how much you could budget for war efforts by the amount of gold you had to back your dollars with, a nice check, a discipline for not over-spending. What to do? Well, you blame the international speculators, say you are saving the dollar from the gold hoarders around the world, and well.. cut the dollar loose from the gold standard.At the same time, what the film and Adam Curtis conveniently did not mention about Kissinger's dealings in the Middle East, he convinced the Saudi's and their oil producing friends of a protection racket. We would back them militarily in the Middle East if they would agree to only sell oil for US dollars. Yep, it was that simple. These two things kicked off the petro-dollar cycle: it goes like this: the fed creates dollars out of thin air, then the US government and the commercial banks borrow those dollars (at interest, of course) and then we, and the rest of the world, buy our oil from the middle east. Then Saudi Arabia and its pals take their profits and put them back into the Federal Reserve (specifically the New York branch). Then... get this brilliance... the Fed takes those dollars and loans them out again.. at interest! Phenomenal! A double loan occurs for money created out of thin air! I've written a book so far, so I will stop there, but research this yourselves folks.. don't believe the crap from this piece of crap from the msm. In conclusion, it is over-simplified garbage that paints a one-sided, dangerous picture. Do not BELIEVE my words, research instead of believing a neatly pieced but through out and through out fictional story with a biased geopolitical agenda. Where's the talk about Wikileaks, Clinton getting funds from Qatar,which has openly supported ISIS, the Qatar-Turkey Pipeline vs. Syria-Iran-Iraq Pipeline. These things were not mentioned because it is a propaganda piece, nothing more and just in time for the election.THERE ARE NO GOOD GUYS IN GEO-POLITICS, remember that.

*SPOILER ALERT* First off, I would start by saying I am generally a huge fan of Mr Curtis' work; The Century of the Self series was brilliant and The Mayfair Set almost as good. However, HyperNormalisation is quite different.Mr Curtis covers a lot of different topics in this film. He starts with New York's near bankruptcy in the 1970's and the bankers effectively dictating to the politicians what cuts to make to public services, before briefly mentioning the hippies of the 1960's and their giving up on trying to change the world in the 1970's, before jumping off to talk about Syria in the 1970's. This is common throughout the film. Mr Curtis talks about one particular topic, make a few points then jumps off to talk about another, seemingly completely unrelated topic.When you watch HyperNormalisation you find yourself asking, "Are you making an argument or a just suggestion?" and then find you do not have an answer to that question.He covers a lot of different topics. Timothy Leary and LSD in the 1960's, the dawn of so-called "cyberspace" in the 1990's (the internet to you or I), the history of suicide bombings in the Middle East, Lebanon, the Iran-Iraq War, Libya, Colonel Gaddafi, Hamas, (the non-existent) WMD's, the overthrow of Saddam Hussein and Gaddafi, the Arab Spring, Facebook, news-generating algorithms, BlackRock, Soviet science fiction writers, the rise of Trump, it's all there, being jumped to, back and forth.The ending is particularly poor and the point he makes is almost so subtle that you only understand it after mulling it over. He makes his final point by reference to a scene in the film Carrie, which no one will understand unless they have seen the film, and with reference to a tearful women, who oozes condescension, complaining about Brexit. Even then, the point he is making is very vague.In the end, it's all just a bit of a mess. What's sad is that Mr Curtis is trying to explain the world and it's future yet watching HyperNormalisation you are left with the impression that he no longer understands it himself.