# It was more like a dream than reality
# I must have thought it was a dream
# While you were here with me
# When you were near I didn't think you would leave
# When you were gone, it was too much to believe
# So with tomorrow
# I will borrow
# Another moment of joy and sorrow
# In another dream
# And another with tomorrow
# So with the sun there won't be time just to look behind
# There won't be reasons, no descriptions for my place in mind
# There was so much I was told, it was not real
# So many things that I could not taste
# But I could feel
# So with tomorrow I will borrow
# Another moment of joy and sorrow
# In another dream
# And another
# With tomorrow. #
Jiang Qing, the widow of Mao Zedong had been locked away
in solitary confinement for ten years.
Over that time, she had hoarded socks and handkerchiefs
And, in 1991, she hanged herself.
She left a note.
It said, "Today the revolution has been stolen by a clique
"led by Deng Xiaoping.
"The result is that unending evils have been
"unleashed on the Chinese people.
"Chairman, your student and fighter is coming to see you."
Jiang Qing's great enemy, Deng Xiaoping, was now all-powerful.
He had got rid of all Jiang Qing's revolutionary dreams,
but he had also smashed all visions of democracy,
by sending troops into Tiananmen Square.
But Tiananmen Square had been a disaster for the regime.
And it also raised a terrible question.
If China no longer believed in revolutionary communism
or in democracy, what did it believe in...
..apart from money?
Deng Xiaoping's solution was to go back into the past
and reawaken an old, powerful fear.
That what had happened in Tiananmen Square had really been
part of a giant conspiracy by the West to destroy China.
It was a conspiracy, he said, that had been going on for 150 years.
It had begun back in the 19th century
Deng now ordered a vast propaganda campaign to begin.
Its aim was to spread the idea of a conspiracy.
At the centre of the campaign was a multimillion dollar film,
including British actors.
It told the story of how the British had brought
hundreds of tonnes of opium into the Port of Canton...
But the British, led by Queen Victoria,
were determined to smash their resistance
and use the opium to reduce the Chinese people to zombies
and so control the whole world.
Fire!
The Chinese propaganda even created an early computer game,
where you could fight against the British as they invaded.
Now, the campaign said, the West were trying to do the same again.
What the Chinese were alleging in their campaign
was historically accurate.
powerful consequences inside Britain itself.
It had started to undermine the self-confidence
of the British Empire...
..and introduce a dark and corrosive fear
into the heart of British society.
For 200 years, the British had transported millions of Africans
to become slaves in their colonies in the Caribbean
and in the Americas.
It had been one of the main forces behind the rise
of the British Empire.
Now they began to realise that they had also done something
terrible to China.
That by forcing opium onto the country,
they had poisoned and corrupted millions of people.
they had enslaved their minds.
One historian wrote...
"Deeply involved as it was in one of the most pernicious,
"yet well-organised and profitable drug trades that has ever
"existed, the British Empire was rotten at its heart."
And that knowledge led to guilt.
It was called the Society for the Suppression of the Opium Trade.
It published pamphlets and books about the horrors
that were happening in China.
They caused a sensation and hundreds of thousands joined the movement.
But as the campaign grew, a strange thing happened -
the guilt over what Britain had done to China began to mutate.
It changed into fear.
And at the end of the 19th century, a hysteria swept Britain -
that the Chinese were preparing to take their revenge.
There was a panic about Chinese-run opium dens in all the major cities.
The truth was that there were less than 1,000 Chinese in Britain
at that time, but the hysteria ran out of control.
It was called the Yellow Peril.
The panic also spread through America,
especially the west coast where there were Chinese migrant workers.
Novel after novel was published in both Britain and America,
It culminated with the invention of a global villain -
Dr Fu Manchu.
Fu Manchu is described by his creator,
a novelist called Sax Rohmer, as a yellow Satan,
an archangel of evil who wants to take over the whole world
and revenge himself on the white race.
The injection of the serum will make his brain mine.
In other words, he becomes a reflection of my will.
He will do as I command, exactly as though I were doing it.
In the name of the British government,
I demand the release of this boy. British government?
I'll wipe them and the whole accursed white race
off the face of the Earth when I get the sword and mask that will call
the teeming millions of Asia to the uprising.
This is only the beginning.
I will wipe out your whole accursed white race.
# C'est toi et seulement toi
# Qui ne voulais plus de moi
# Maintenant c'est trop tard pour pleure
# Sans doute t'imaginais
# Que j'allais rester enfermee
# Au carmel pendant dix annees mais tu t'es trompe
# C'est a l'amour comme a la guerre
# Tu l'as voulu et tu me perds
# Va faire soigner tes blessures ailleurs
# C'est a l'amour comme a la guerre
# Tu l'as voulu et tu me perds
# Et moi je ne suis ni la Croix rouge
# Ni ta mere
# C'est toi et seulement toi
# Qui t'ennuyais avec moi
# Qui connaissais toutes mes histoires
# Par coeur... #
In the early 1990s, the Western democracies seemed to be the future.
The collapse of the Soviet Union meant that their ideas
were now going to spread all across the world.
# C'est a l'amour comme a la guerre
# Tu l'as voulu et tu me perds
# Va faire soigner tes blessures ailleurs. #
But at home, in both Britain and America,
there were still forces deep in the heart of both societies that
had little to do with democracy.
Man with a gun.
12 Georgia 30, I need additional units,
6-7 and Dacre, I've got a 4-50 male with a gun...
the old structures of power and the corruption
and the anger that created was still there.
In Los Angeles in March 1991, Rodney King was chased
and stopped by police for drunken driving.
Despite offering no resistance, he was beaten repeatedly
by four officers.
It was videoed by a man watching from a balcony.
He took it to the police, but no-one was interested.
So he gave the tape to a local TV station.
When it was shown, there was an outburst of anger
against the police violence.
Four of the officers were put on trial.
But they were all acquitted by an overwhelmingly white jury.
Due to the escalation of the situation,
and seriousness of the problems that are occurring,
the sheriff has mobilised all department personnel.
For six days, thousands of people rose up
and rioted across Los Angeles.
It was only stopped when the National Guard and soldiers
and Marines were brought onto the streets.
It was an outpouring of the anger that had been simmering
throughout the 1980s in the black community.
But despite all the reforms and the changes in attitudes
since the 1960s, nothing had really changed.
It seemed that those in power in America were still deeply racist,
and would use violence against blacks in America
to maintain that power.
All of it needs to stop but I'm going to tell you...
Get down on our knees and pray to God...
One at a time.
That the violence... Let me talk.
I know that the government, whatever, can't stand
us black people.
He's doing everything in the world to make black man be extinct.
But I'm going to tell you one thing, us black people
are going to survive.
And that's wrong about the black people tearing up the, you know,
So fuck everybody, I'm off.
All right, that's just an example of the frustration
that's being felt here.
In Britain, a series of scandals revealed that dozens
of innocent people had been held in jail...
..some for over 15 years.
They included the Guildford Four and the Birmingham Six.
Most of them were Irishmen who'd been accused of being
members of the IRA and planting bombs in English cities.
Every time they had tried to prove their innocence,
they had been blocked by some of the most senior figures
in the British establishment,
despite overwhelming evidence of false confessions
and faked evidence.
Eminent men at the very centre of power,
from the most senior law lord to the Attorney General
and to the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police,
all of them, it was alleged, knew that the prisoners were innocent.
But they had done nothing,
and the evidence remained locked away...
..because they had an unshakeable conviction that the establishment
must never be shown to be wrong.
Finally, in March 1991,
the Birmingham Six were freed at the Old Bailey.
Ladies and gentlemen.
For 16 and a half years, we have been used as political
scapegoats for people in there at the highest.
The police told us from the start that they knew we hadn't done it.
They told us they didn't care who'd done it.
They told us that we were selected and that they were going to
frame us just to keep the people in there happy.
That's what it's all about.
To save face.
Justice? I don't think them people in there have got the intelligence
nor the honesty to spell the word, never mind dispense it.
They're rotten.
But there were others, also at the heart of power in Britain,
who seemed to have lost all contact with reality.
The intelligence agencies, from MI6 to GCHQ,
whose job was to watch and monitor what was happening in the world,
had completely failed to predict the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Mrs Thatcher, who had supported the spies throughout the 1980s,
was shocked.
Her foreign policy adviser wrote...
"the one thing we needed to know.
"That the Soviet Union was about to collapse."
It was a colossal failure
of the whole Western system of intelligence.
Sir Percy Cradock was head of the Joint Intelligence Committee.
Despite everything, he was convinced the Soviets were just
faking the collapse.
They were just up to their usual tricks.
They were still planning to take over the world.
Both Britain and America were societies that had been
built on empire and conquest through violence and the exercise of power.
But neither of them had ever faced up to this.
And instead, they had both built dreamlike myths
about their exceptionalism, to shield and protect themselves.
But in both cases, those myths were rooted in fear.
In Britain at the start of the 20th century,
not only were those in charge frightened by what
they had done abroad, with the slave trade and in China,
they now had a feeling that it was coming closer,
that something dangerous might also be happening inside England itself.
The Empire had led to giant industrial cities
rising up all across England.
They were dark, frightening places where millions of people
lived in appalling conditions.
What alarmed those in charge was the violence and the anger that
was building up there among what was called the masses.
But the danger also seemed to come from the top of society as well.
From the new industrialists and bankers, who ran the global empire.
They also seemed to be out of control.
There was a wave of financial scandals
and no-one seemed to be able to stop them.
The novelist EM Forster wrote...
"England is being menaced by the inner darkness in high places
"that has come with this commercial age."
Trapped by what they saw as a danger below
and corruption above, the middle classes retreated.
They turned away into another imaginary version of England,
where there were none of these threats.
It was invented for them by a whole generation of writers,
artists and musicians who,
in an act of collective imagination,
created a complete dream image of England's past...
..one that still haunts the country today.
At its heart was a vision of a natural order in the countryside,
outside the cities.
One of the key figures was a man called Cecil Sharp.
He travelled through England recording old songs,
and he filmed himself and his friends learning old rural dances.
His aim was to create a new kind of English nationalism
which had, at its heart, the idea of the folk.
It was a concept that he had taken from German nationalism -
the innocent rural people and their culture.
Now, is the sort of dancing he does the dancing that would have been
done around here...? Yeah, there's a lot of that done in the pubs.
Do-do, do-do, do-diddly-do...
What was implicit in Sharp's vision was that it was
an England before mass democracy had come.
An England where villagers lived in harmony and safety,
taken care of by the lord of the manor.
Sharp was not alone.
In 1914, a festival was started in Glastonbury.
It ran every year until 1927.
who wanted it to be the centre of this new English culture.
He composed an opera for the festival,
which became a national sensation.
It was called The Immortal Hour.
It is set in a dark, mysterious wood,
where there are powerful, ancient forces.
They can be frightening, but they are also a way of connecting
with a forgotten natural order of power in England.
They are the lordly ones.
# How beautiful they are
# The lordly ones
# Who dwell in the hills
# In the hollow hills
# They have faces like flowers
# And their breath is a wind
# That blows o'er the summer meadows
# Filled with dewy clover
# Their limbs are more white than shafts of moonshine
# They are more fleet than the March wind
# They laugh and are glad and are terrible
# When their lances shake and glitter
# Ev'ry green reed quivers. #
This is a story that begins in any part of America,
wherever you may be.
It's a story that begins at your front door, on the street
where you live, in your town or village or city,
somewhere in America.
And paths enchanted that lead to the wonderful pages
of a storybook, that tell the story of America, the beautiful.
Unlike Britain, America had emerged from the First World War
as the most powerful country in the world.
Its president, Woodrow Wilson, had a vision that America should
now use that power to spread democracy all around the globe.
..that the country was special,
not like the old corrupt empires of Europe.
And it could use that specialness to remake the world.
But the Republicans who controlled Congress refused to back Wilson.
They thought that such a crusade would end up corrupting America...
..and Wilson's dream of a globalised democracy collapsed.
Instead, the American economy went into a severe depression.
In a growing mood of fear, there were race riots,
as whites turned on the black communities in the cities.
In 1921, a white mob attacked the black areas in the city of Tulsa...
..and destroyed them.
They even used aircraft to drop bombs.
Out of this fear came an organisation
called the Ku Klux Klan.
The Klan had first been formed after the American Civil War...
..but now it re-emerged.
The Klan also believed in the idea of America's exceptionalism.
They took that myth and turned it into something frightening
and violent,
The model for this dark and hateful version came from a feature film
made in 1915 called The Birth Of A Nation.
It was an epic that caused a sensation,
reaching a wider audience than any film had ever done.
The director, DW Griffith, had based the film
on a novel called The Clansman.
The image of the clansman in both the book
and in the film was of white-robed figures with burning crosses.
These had nothing to do with anything real in America's past.
Instead, the novelist had invented them
from a romantic vision of an old Scotland and Scottish clans
that were portrayed in the novels of Sir Walter Scott...
..which Scott himself had just made up.
Again, like in England, it was a vision of a stable society
Figures from a feudal time,
a time before mass democracy and all its dangers and uncertainties.
In real life, the new Klan then copied the costumes
and imitated the rituals from the film...
..and it quickly became a mass organisation.
By 1925, the Klan had five million members...
..and the political power to mount a mass march on Washington.
They called themselves the Invisible Empire.
The Klan had a powerful appeal to whites,
frightened of the blacks in the ever-expanding cities.
And they also revived fears of the Chinese, the Yellow Peril.
What the clansmen were doing was retreating
into a mythical version of the past.
It gave them a sense of power...
And in Britain, the belief in the idea of a natural order
of power continued to grow, even as the real power was declining.
And this deluded confidence was going to have very strange
consequences for the whole world.
After the First World War, a group of upper-class English men
and women were sent to Baghdad to create a new country
The most famous was Gertrude Bell.
She was the daughter of a baronet and had been a famous explorer.
Almost immediately, hundreds of thousands of Arabs rose up,
demanding independence.
The British had been financially broken by the war,
so they invented a new and cheap way of suppressing the insurgency.
They used aircraft to bomb the rebels.
They called it aerial policing...
..and they took back control and set about creating the new country,
But because there was no money,
the group could also not afford to survey the country.
Instead, with no information, Bell and the others
simply projected onto the Arabs that powerful, romantic dream
of an old England.
They decided that the middle classes in the cities, who had run
the country under the Ottoman Empire,
were corrupt and untrustworthy...
..which meant that they had to be excluded from power.
Instead, power should be given to the sheiks who ruled
the tribes out in the countryside.
To the British, the sheiks represented the true Iraq,
because they hadn't been infected by the corruption of the modern world.
Their system was one of a natural order,
just like in the England of the past.
"The sheiks," said Gertrude Bell, "are like great aristocrats.
"They will run a system that will maintain a natural equilibrium."
The truth was that this picture of Iraq
was completely detached from reality.
The sheiks were really marginal figures,
while the Ottomans had begun to create a modern,
progressive society in the cities.
The British now tore that apart,
and replaced it with a strange dream that had nothing to do with
the complex, multilayered society in front of their eyes...
Then, in 1932, the British, facing an economic crisis at home,
packed up and went...
..leaving behind them a completely unreal and unstable society.
DOLLS CHATTER AND LAUGH
# But I think we have to walk
# I keep waving at the taxis
# They keep turning their lights off
# But Julie knows a party
# At some actor's West Side loft
# Supplies are endless in the evening
# By the morning they'll be gone
# I got a flask inside my pocket
# We can share it on the train
# And if you promise to stay conscious
# I will try and do the same
# Well, we might die from medication
# But we sure killed all the pain
# But what was normal in the evening
# The reasons all have run away
# But the feeling never did
# It's not something I would recommend
# But it is one way to live
# Cos what is simple in the moonlight
# By the morning never is. #
MECHANICAL VOICE: We have located the Doctor.
At the same time as large numbers of factories began to
close across America, a new drug was created.
It was made by a company that had been founded by Arthur Sackler.
In the 1970s, Sackler had marketed the drug Valium to deal with
He had died in the 1980s, but in the mid-'90s
his company released a new drug called OxyContin.
It was a synthetic form of opium, and it was sold as a painkiller.
But then, workers who were being laid off as the factories closed
found that they got more benefits if they were disabled...
EXPLOSION
Oh, shit!
..so they went to their doctors and said they were injured.
And the doctors gave them OxyContin.
They got their benefits,
but they also discovered that OxyContin made them feel safe,
in a bubble, protected from the anxieties and fears
of the new post-industrial world.
CLOCK CHIMES
In the 1950s, as the Empire collapsed around them,
the British Government saw the intelligence agencies as one of
the few ways in which Britain could still remain powerful
around the world.
In the public's eyes, the spies were powerful, glamorous figures,
epitomised by James Bond,
who proved that Britain still had global power.
In reality, MI6 was full of communists who kept defecting
to the Soviet Union...
..while MI5, whose job was to catch such traitors,
hadn't caught one for years.
A tough police chief from Glasgow was sent in to reform MI5,
but the agents would only talk to him in Latin,
which he didn't understand.
He gave up, and told his wife that it was like working in a madhouse.
Then MI5 was told by the Americans that one of its own agents
was also a traitor.
Surveyor of the Queen's pictures, Sir Anthony Blunt.
He, of course, is here. Sir Anthony, if we are going to...
MI5 asked Blunt if he was spying for the Russians.
He said yes, he was,
so to avoid embarrassing the Queen, they gave him total immunity
from prosecution and let him carry on working at Buckingham Palace.
The negro is ticking under the picture.
I've been listening to him while you were talking.
And it is indeed a clock. Yes.
And the mechanism is peculiar because the actual time,
if you want to know the time, you have to look into the eyes.
John le Carre had worked as a spy for MI6,
and the experience made him understand what this secret world
was really about -
that, in a country whose power had collapsed,
leaving only a drab, decaying reality all around,
the spies had managed to recreate a magical world
where they could go anywhere they wanted,
bug, burgle, and even assassinate people
without any fear of judgment or control,
just like in the Empire.
There is something delicious about being told,
"Now, we're going to have to burgle that house tonight,
"and what we'll do is we'll have a policeman outside,
"and while the owners of the house are away, in case they come back,
"the policeman will say, 'I'm sorry, you can't come in.
"'We've had a burglary report on your premises.'"
And these larcenous instincts which are put to the service
of the Crown had a voluptuous quality in the sense
that this was a necessary sacrifice of morality.
I really believed at last that I had found a cause I could serve.
I also longed for the dignity which great secrecy confers upon you.
KNOCK AT DOOR
In America, the spies and their secret operations
were also being used to maintain a fiction.
Ever since the Second World War,
the American Government had been using the CIA to manipulate
and overthrow the governments of many other countries.
One of the most senior members of the US State Department,
Hans Morgenthau, had given this hidden system of power a name.
He called it the dual state.
America had to do this, Morgenthau said,
because of the harsh realities of power in the world.
But it had to be kept secret from the people,
because revealing it would undermine their belief in democracy
and in their exceptionalism,
a belief that was essential in the Cold War.
and organised violent coups in Italy, Greece, Syria, Iran,
Guatemala, South Vietnam, Indonesia, and Chile.
In all, the United States ran covert operations to overthrow
66 foreign governments, and in 26 cases, they succeeded.
Morgenthau believed that this secrecy was creating a dangerous
time bomb at the heart of America,
and in the mid-1960s, details started to leak out.
One of the senior members of the CIA, Miles Copeland,
revealed that he had been involved in organising coups
throughout the world, starting in Syria in 1951.
worst fears, about the way in which American policy is conducted,
for example, plotting to overthrow the Syrian Government and others.
Do you think that's a useful way of conducting foreign policy?
Keith, I'm not going to make a moral judgment.
I've simply described the way things are done.
It is true. Now, let me finish.
It is true that in many cases, we would sit around, in our attics
of the State Department, and we would have long discussions.
"Our government does not interfere in the internal affairs
"of a sovereign nation."
And we meant that from the bottom of our hearts, and then we'd say,
"But this is one case where we have to,"
and so we had to try to decide
how to do what it was we said was against our policy to do.
And we did, in fact, interfere in internal affairs
of many sovereign nations.
Wherever he walked, all hell broke loose.
SCREAMING
Across all the Orient, the flames of violence leaped.
Was the quiet stranger the torch?
10,000 mysteries swirled about him.
Wherever danger exploded, they found the quiet American.
And in 1961, the CIA decided to overthrow a government
in the heart of Africa, in the Congo.
200 years before, the Congo had been at the centre of the slave trade.
Millions of Africans had been forcibly taken down the river
and shipped to America,
where their forced labour fuelled America's rise to economic power.
Now the country had been given independence by its old
colonial rulers, the Belgians, but it was completely unprepared,
and had collapsed into violence.
The CIA were frightened that the new Prime Minister,
Patrice Lumumba, was about to turn for help to the Soviet Union.
It meant that the Russians might take control of the
giant copper mines in the south of the country.
The copper was crucial to the new electronic systems
and computers that the Americans were building.
They were the foundations of America's new wealth and power...
..and the CIA helped Lumumba's opponents capture and kill him.
And they helped install a dictator in his place.
He was called Colonel Mobutu,
whose brutal regime the Americans would support for the next 30 years.
Rather than establishing a democracy,
what the Americans had found themselves doing was continuing
the instability that had been created by the old European empires,
and then they did the same in Iraq.
In 1963, agents from the CIA came to Baghdad to plan another coup.
One idea was to secretly poison the communists in the government...
..but the country the British had created was by now so unstable
that before the Americans could act,
the Ba'ath Party mounted their own coup.
The streets of ancient Baghdad become the scene of a short
but decisive revolution that topples the pro-communist government
of Premier Abd al-Karim Qasim, shown here on the right.
A six-man military junta seizes power on a holy day,
and within hours, the premier, who reportedly had executed
They even gave one of the young Ba'ath Party members, Saddam Hussein,
a list of communists in Iraq.
Saddam Hussein used it to execute thousands,
and it began his rise to power.
He later ordered a feature film to be made about his heroic role
in the coup.
It was made by the British director Terence Young,
who had also made the James Bond film Dr No.
When Deng Xiaoping died, the country he had created was growing fast,
becoming more and more powerful.
But those who took over knew there were threats.
They were frightened of their people,
because they knew that, having got rid of the communist ideals,
they were now totally dependent on the economic system
that Deng had created, but that had brought with it the growing force
of individualism, a force that had the power to eat away
at all the collective ideals that had held the society together.
And outside China, they were increasingly frightened
by the global financial system run by the Western bankers.
The paranoia and suspicion about the West
had gone very deep into the minds of the new rulers.
But for the moment, the money from the West continued to pour in,
and their power grew further.
At the end of 1997,
Britain had agreed to hand Hong Kong back to China.
During the negotiations, the British had insisted that Hong Kong
should remain democratic.
The Chinese were shocked by this.
They said it was completely hypocritical,
because the British had never allowed democracy in Hong Kong.
It had always been an authoritarian system,
controlled by a brutal and racist police force.
SHOUTING
Who's got the mace? Chemical mace? Sergeant, mace!
SHOUTING
Get the fuck out of it, you little gobshite.
Get out of it.
He's got to be subdued, man.
Get him! Hold him down!
Get him down! On the floor!
HEAVY BREATHING
The British Government sent an envoy to negotiate with the Chinese.
He was Sir Percy Cradock,
who had finally accepted that the Cold War was over.
But after the talks,
Sir Percy announced that he agreed with the Chinese.
The demand for democracy, he said, was difficult
because when the British ruled Hong Kong,
there had never been any democracy.
Sir Percy was not invited to the handover.
And in the pouring rain, Prince Charles watched as the Chinese
said goodbye to the British by singing them a Rod Stewart song,
Rhythm Of My Heart.
THEY SING
And despite the Chinese triumphalism,
the BBC continued the fantasy of the special virtues of Britain's Empire.
NEWSREEL: China is certainly jubilant about the return of this
412 square miles of territory, and that jubilation is everywhere
in Hong Kong, but as we've seen tonight,
it isn't quite as simple as that.
There's a genuine fondness for Britain's decent contribution here,
a genuine fondness for the last governor, too.
"He's family," as one Chinese Hong Kong-er described it to me.
In 1998, the very thing the Chinese leaders were frightened of happened.
The global financial system went out of control.
It began in Thailand, where Western banks had been pouring
millions of dollars into a property boom.
Suddenly, the bubble burst,
and developers defaulted on their loans.
Western investors panicked, and rushed to get their money out.
The crisis then spread all across East Asia to Korea and Indonesia.
In every case, the country's exchange rate crashed,
causing economic chaos.
Indonesia's currency has collapsed, losing 80% of its value,
and the economy is in ruins.
With riots and looting breaking out across the country,
there are fears that it's now on the brink of anarchy.
The IMF gave huge loans to try and stabilise the countries.
For a moment, it worked, but then the currencies crashed again
as those dollars were used by Western banks
to get the rest of their money out of the countries.
To the countries' leaders, this was the old corrupt imperialism
returning in a modern form.
Power corrupts, as much as government can become corrupt
when invested with absolute power,
markets also can become corrupt when equally absolutely powerful.
We are seeing the effect of that absolute power today,
the impoverishment and misery of millions of people
and their eventual slavery.
China managed to escape the crisis,
but it seemed to confirm to the country's leaders
that their paranoia about the Western conspiracy was right,
that the West was prepared to use its economic power to loot
and wreck the Asian countries, just as it had in the past.
They decided that the only way to make China safe
was to take control.
The chairman, Jiang Zemin, instructed that all the dollars
This would make the dollar rise in value,
which meant that Chinese goods would be even cheaper,
but it would also make interest rates in America low,
which meant that people would borrow even more money from the banks,
and buy even more Chinese goods.
It was a virtuous circle.
What the Chinese were doing was using the money
to create a safe bubble, wrapped around the United States,
But in the process, the Chinese money would create the biggest
consumer and property boom ever in history,
and lead America into a protected dream world
that was increasingly detached from the reality outside.
And that dreamlike state was going to have extraordinary consequences,
not just for America and China, but for the whole world.
The city is going through its worst sandstorms in living memory.
It's swathed the city in this...
..ochre colour, this blanket of red dust, it's raining now...
It's literally raining mud.
Just look at it. I mean, this used to be just completely full
of the international press.
I mean, there's still a lot a lot of foreign journalists here,
but it's just blown apart by the worst sandstorms
that people say is in living memory.
Watch the cable.
In 2003, America and Britain were preparing to invade Iraq.
For George Bush and the Americans,
the aim was to bring stability to the Middle East,
It was part of a new kind of global intervention
that was not like the empires of the past.
Instead, it was a way of liberating millions of people from a brutal
dictator, which would then allow them to become free democratic
individuals, but there were people in Britain who knew the
strange origins of Iraq, how 80 years before, English administrators
had gone there and created a highly unstable society
rooted in false dreams of England's past.
A group of six historians came to see Tony Blair.
They explained to him the complex reality of the different groups
in Iraq, and how they could easily turn on the Western intervention.
There was silence in the room.
Tony Blair said,
"Saddam Hussein is an evil man who needs to be removed,"
Then the spies came to see Tony Blair.
They told him that there were hidden weapons of mass destruction in Iraq,
which justified the invasion.
But yet again, they were inventing a magical world of hidden threats...
..and the invasion began.
By 2007, the war in Iraq had become a nightmare.
The Americans were pouring nearly $1 billion in every day
to keep a conflict going that no-one knew how to win.
In the past, the Vietnam War had caused chaos at home in America,
not just in the mass protests,
but the cost of such a gigantic war had wrecked the American economy,
with growing inflation and unemployment.
The politicians had no idea how to deal with the economic chaos,
and it, as much as the protests, had forced them to admit defeat
and flee from Saigon.
But now with the Iraq war, there was no effect on the economy,
and there were no protests.
The reason was the Chinese money.
The Chinese continued to buy up more and more of the American
Government debt, which meant that the consumer boom continued,
and, safe in their protected bubble,
few of the American people protested.
The war was far away, and had no effect on their lives,
which meant there was no pressure on the politicians to admit defeat,
and that led them to try ever more desperate measures
to achieve victory.
But that desperation was going to awaken ghosts from the past
that would return in a distorted and frightening form.
Sheikh Abdul Sattar Abu Risha was the leader of one of the largest
Sunni tribes in Anbar Province outside Baghdad.
He came to the Americans and offered to help them.
In return for large amounts of money, he said,
his tribe would ally with the Americans and create a militia
to fight against the insurgents, above all, against al-Qaida in Iraq.
In desperation, the Americans agreed...
Which tribe?
..and the idea quickly spread across the country -
the Americans giving out millions of dollars to Sunni tribal leaders
to create private armies.
It was called the Awakening,
and Sheikh Abu Risha became a heroic figure.
When President Bush came to Iraq,
he met the sheikh to thank him personally for saving the Americans.
TRANSLATION:
But what the Americans had found themselves doing
was exactly the same as the British had done 80 years before.
Faced by a complex society that they did not understand,
they were turning to the tribes outside the cities
and giving them power.
They called the militias the Sons of Iraq,
and it seemed to work,
but in reality, it was going to lead to something even worse.
Three years later, as the American troops prepared to leave Iraq,
the money stopped, and the tribal leaders saw their power disappear.
So they made a tactical decision -
they turned and allied instead with the very people
they had been fighting - the al-Qaida in Iraq jihadists.
And out of that alliance came
the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.
ISIS was far more than just another version of al-Qaida in Iraq.
Its public face were the jihadists,
As a result, they swept through Iraq and on into Syria.
What had begun a long time ago as a make-believe version of England
created in the deserts of Mesopotamia as the British Empire
fell apart, had now turned into a terrifying nightmare.
# How beautiful they are, the lordly ones
# Who dwell in the hills, in the hollow hills
# They have faces like flowers
# And their breath is a wind that blows over summer meadows
# Filled with dewy clover
# How beautiful they are, the lordly ones
# Who dwell in the hills, in the hollow hills
# They have faces like flowers and their breath is a wind
# That blows over summer meadows filled with dewy clover
# Their limbs are more white than shafts of moonshine... #
And that mythical romantic view of the past was also about to return
at home in both America and Britain,
and it was going to have powerful consequences there too.
In his campaign, Donald Trump promised to recreate a lost America.
We will make America proud again.
CHEERING
We will make America safe again.
And we will make America great again.
God bless you and goodnight.
I love you.
But with the exceptionalism also came the fear,
and the violence.
And in Britain, thousands of those who had been marginalised
by the new global economy also came to believe in that romantic idea
of England as a special place.
A picture of a lost greatness that had been invented by
the upper classes in the 1920s.
Now, hundreds and thousands of frightened and angry people
demanded that Britain leave Europe...
..and the old ruling class come back and turn that dream into a reality.
CHEERING
HE SHOUTS TO CROWD
MUSIC: With Tomorrow by This Mortal Coil
# In another dream, and another
# With tomorrow. #