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The Power of Nightmares

Yesterday, over a hundred people were killed in Kandahar, Afghanistan in the deadliest suicide bombing since the 2001 fall of the Taliban. A day earlier, 40 people were killed across the border in neighboring Pakistan’s northwestern tribal town of Parachinar. Meanwhile, in the Middle East, a female suicide bomber detonated her explosives in a commercial area in a Shiite neighborhood of Baghdad yesterday, the latest in a string of attacks by female bombers in Iraq.

Before 2005, suicide attacks were a very rare phenomenon in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq – now they’re an almost weekly or daily occurrence. The increasing frequency of such attacks is seen as direct proof of the growing influence of the Al Qaeda so-called terror network and radical Islamic fundamentalism.

Here in the US, reading about these attacks from so far away makes us feel far-removed from the conflict. But what if you knew that the origins of today’s international conflict that the US calls the “Global War on Terror” lie in 1940’s America? A three-part documentary produced by British film maker Adam Curtis for the BBC, lays out a comprehensive, chronological, and compelling account of the rise of the two sides of this war, going back decades to today. The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of The Politics of Fear, traces the origins of the American Neo-conservative Movement, and Islamic Fundamentalist terrorism in three hour long episodes, which we are pleased to offer today as a thank you gift for your donation.

The Power of Nightmares is the most compelling, interesting, and exciting documentary I have seen in a very long time. So far it’s been the most popular thank you gift on our pledge drive, with nearly 500 listeners ordering copies of it.

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