History as Fiction: How the Ruling Elite Rewrites History

The Living Dead

Directed by Adam Curtis

Part 1 – “On the Desperate Edge of Now”

Film Review

The Living Dead is an early Adam Curtis documentary regarding collective perception control techniques ruling elites use to retain power. It specifically addresses the technique of re-creating national history to ensure that populations selectively recall positive historical eras while suppressing all memory of negative events. Only Parts 1 and 3 are available in full on YouTube (Part 2 “You Have Used Me as a Fish Long Enough” is available but the audio is too distorted to be intelligible). Tomorrow I’ll post Part 3, about Margaret Thatcher channeling Winston Churchill’s messianic vision.

In Part 1, Curtis focuses on the Nuremberg war crimes trials of 1945-46. He maintains these trials were the first major propaganda assault against any historical memory of atrocities and war crimes the US and Britain committed during World War II (see British and American War Crimes During World War II).

In the US, the official determination to re-frame World War II as the “just war” would prove very troubling for individual veterans who had witnessed American atrocities (Kurt Vonnegut writes about it in Slaughterhouse Five and Joseph Heller in Catch 22).

The resulting disconnect between official accounts and their lived experiences often resulted in intense feelings of apprehension, hopelessness, isolation and fear of impending disaster. (It sure did in my father.)

The film features an excerpt from a secret film the US army made about a program designed to help veterans “forget” their troubling memories.