Bitter Lake, 2015 - Adam Curtis

Another revealing & emotive deep dive from Adam Curtis - exploring the US-Saudi - Afghan sh!tshow & the history behind it.

“Increasingly we live in a world where nothing makes any sense. Events come and go like waves of a fever, leaving us confused and uncertain. Those in power tell us stories to help us make sense of the complexity of reality, but those stories are increasingly unconvincing and hollow. This is a film about why those stories have stopped making sense and how that led us in the west to become a destructive and dangerous force in the world.”
Adam Curtis.

Bitter Lake is a 2015 BBC documentary by British filmmaker Adam Curtis. It argues that Western politicians have manufactured a simplified story about militant Islam, turning it into a good vs. evil argument informed by, and a reaction to, Western society's increasing chaos and disorder, which they neither grasp nor understand. The film makes extended use of newsreels and archive footage, and intersperses brief narrative segments with longer segments that depict violence and war in Afghanistan.

Bitter Lake attempts to explain several complex and interconnected narratives. One of the narratives is how past governments, including Russia and the West, with their continued, largely failing, interventions in Afghanistan, keep repeating such failures, without properly understanding the country's cultural background or its past political history and societal structure.

The film also outlines the US's alliance with Saudi Arabia, especially the US's agreement to buy Saudi oil, for control of a key energy supplier during the cold-war era, with Saudi Arabia gaining wealth and security in return. Part of the agreement provided that Saudi Arabia was allowed to continue its violent and fundamentalist interpretation of Islam, Wahhabism, free from external influence. Saudi support for Wahhabism fed many of the militant Islamic forces from the 1970s to the present, including the Mujahideen, Taliban, Al-Qaeda, and the Islamic State.