I love Adam Curtis. Watch “The Power of Nightmares” or “The Trap – What Happened to our Dreams of Freedom” if you can find them, really great portrayals of the sinister side of recent history. He has a blog with the BBC where he puts up posts full of archival footage and analysis about Afghanistan (on which he’s working on a project on) amongst other things. The most recent post has footage of villages being bombed and burned from the air in the 1930’s in Waziristan, on the Afghan – Pakistan border. It resembles of a mix of the current war there and what the Sudanese campaign in Darfur was up to. A relative of mine flew RAF missions similar to these in Egypt/Sudan, policing tribes from the air between the wars. I don’t like to think what he may have been responsible for.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/2010/04/the_weird_world_of_waziristan.html
It’s frightening the way these events, and similar ones in Iraq during the 1920’s have repeated. Another question reading this post raises is what exactly is going to happen in the North Caucasus? The bitterness there, translating into suicide bombs in the Moscow underground is extradonarily potent. Sometimes you need to be jolted out of your comfortable assumptions that the course of human history if one of progress and enlightenment. Curtis is good at doing that.
Also, the word “goolies” turns up in the video, a word we used as kids. Didn’t realise it came via the British from the Pashtu language. The Waziri tribesmen had a policy of collecting British “goolies” so the Brits had a policy of offering a financial award if the airmen or soldiers were returned with “goolies” intact, hence the word entering the English language.
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