Syria - Bloody travel from first American 'democratic' experiment 1947

Adam Curtis ........ What is happening in Syria feels like one of the last gasps of the age of the military dictators. An old way of running the world is still desperately trying to cling to power, but the underlying feeling in the west is that somehow Assad's archaic and cruel military rule will inevitably collapse and Syrians will move forward into a democratic age. That may, or may not, happen, but what is extraordinary is that we have been here before. Between 1947 and 1949 an odd group of idealists and hard realists in the American government set out to intervene in Syria. Their aim was to liberate the Syrian people from a corrupt autocratic elite - and allow true democracy to flourish. They did this because they were convinced that "the Syrian people are naturally democratic" and that all that was neccessary was to get rid of the elites - and a new world of "peace and progress" would inevitably emerge.

What resulted was a disaster, and the consequences of that disaster then led, through a weird series of bloody twists and turns, to the rise to power of the Assad family and the widescale repression in Syria today. ------------------ I thought I would tell that story. ---------------------------

In 1968 a CIA agent called Miles Copeland wrote a book called 'The Game of Nations' that revealed what went on in 1947. Back then Copeland was part of a mangement consulting team in Washington who were working out how America should contain the threat of communism in the Middle East, now the old European Empires had gone. This was before the CIA existed, and Copeland describes how they got together an odd group of diplomats, secret agents left over from the war, advertising men from Madison Avenue, and "pipe-smoking owls" (which is what intellectuals were called in those days).

Copeland describes an impassioned lecturer telling this group that their aim should be to change the leadership in the countries in the Middle East:

"Politicians in Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Egypt seem to have been elected into power, but what elections! The winners were all candidates of foreign powers, old land-owners who tell their tenants and villagers how to vote, or rich crooks who can buy their votes. But peoples of these countries are intelligent, and they have a natural bent for politics. If there is a part of the world which is crying for the democratic process the Arab World is it."

They decided to start with Syria.

Compared to what was to come, it was all very sweet and innocent. Elections were due in Syria in 1947, and the Americans decided to give "a discreet nudge here and there". This involved warning landowners, employers, ward bosses and police chiefs not to intimidate the voters. The American oil companies were paid to put up big posters telling the Syrians to "vote for the candidate of your choice" (apparently this baffled all the Syrians because the posters didn't mention any candidates by name). Hundreds of taxis were hired to take voters to the polls free of charge. And the Americans brought in automatic, tamper-proof voting machines.

It didn't go as expected. The landowners and other elites ignored all the warnings and intimidated everyone. There were massive gun fights and scores of people were killed. The taxi-drivers bonded together and sold themselves to different candidates - promising to make their passengers vote the "right" way. The voting machines didn't work properly because of irregularities in the electric current, or were sabotaged. Two did work - but the losing candidates refused to accept the verdict of "imperialist technology" - and got recounts by hand, which strangely made them win.

And worst of all, most of the pro-American candidates defected to other foreign powers. The Americans had nobly refused to give them any money - so the Russians, the French and the British stepped in and bribed them - and the candidates changed their allegiances.

The Americans were upset. So they decided they would have to go further. The chief diplomat in Damascus was called James Keeley. The solution he said was to find a way of "quarantining" the Syrians from the corrupting forces that had wrecked the election so they would become more self-confident. More "naturally democratic". Here is a picture of James Keeley.

And the way to create this "quarantine" was by engineering a military coup. According to Copeland, Keeley believed that America should get rid of the present elected leaders, bring in a short period of dictatorship which would protect the Syrian people and thus allow them to develop self-confidence and stronger personalities, and within a few years a real independent democracy would emerge.

And that is what the Americans did. In 1949 a "Political Action Team" was set up that went and made friends with the head of the Syrian army, Husni al-Za'im. Copeland was part of the team and he is completely open about what they did.

The political action team suggested to Za'im the idea of a coup d'etat, advised him how to go about it, guided him through the intricate preparations in laying the groundwork for it...Za'im was 'the American boy'.

But the Syrian Baathists weren't going to be outclassed. A month later they mounted their coup, and this time without the CIA's help. Hafez al-Assad was one of the leaders. Everything went fine until Assad arrived outside one of Syria's main airbases to take it over. The officers refused to let him in because they said he wasn't really a Baathist, he was a Nasserist. Assad stood for hours shouting "I'm not a Nasserist, I'm a Baathist" at the airmen. The revolution was held up as they argued over the niceties of Pan-Arab theory.

But it succeeded. And it now looked as if the Baath vision might really spread across the Arab world. Nasser was furious - he used everyone's favourite political insult. He called them "fascists".

It is an early example of the techno-orientalism that is being repeated today in the media's firm belief that it is the western social media networks that made possible the rebellions in Tunisia and Egypt.

The dream of Baathism was to overcome the sectarianism that had always riven the Arab world, to create a secular society in which everyone was included. But now, as Assad and his four friends on the secret committee took power, that sectarianism rose up to possess and distort their revolution.

Of the five conspirators, three of them - including Assad - came from the Alawite sect. They were a Shia sect who lived in the western mountains of Syria. The two others were Ismailis - another branch of Shia Islam. Traditionally power in Syria had resided with the old Sunni landowning and merchant class of the plains who also made up the bulk of the population. The seizing of power by Assad and his conspirators was a dramatic reversal. It was the triumph of a low-class peasant population and lower middle class urbanites against the old metropolitan elites. And the Sunnis hated it.

The hatred went deep because when the French ruled the country they had practiced a programme of divide and rule which deliberately fomented and exaggerated the sectarian divisions in the country. Faced with this, Assad began to follow a logic that would destroy the very core of Michel Aflaq's dream of a united Arab world. Assad wasn't a sectarian, but he moved through the army and the institutions of state ruthlessly installing those he trusted into positions of power - while removing, often bloodily, Sunnis, Druze and other members of the old elite Syrian class. And many of those he installed were Alawites, like him.

In the process Assad also came into conflict with the other four members of the secret committee behind the revolution. So he destroyed them too. Until, by 1969, there were only two men left - Assad and an austere General called Salah Jadid. Assad couldn't get rid of Jadid because he was protected by the ruthless Bureau of National Security. So Assad sent troops to the one petrol station where all the security bureau jeeps refuelled - and grabbed them one by one. When the head of the bureau realised that he was defeated, he rang one of Assad's allies and then shot himself so that his enemy could hear the gunshot.

Here is some footage - beginning with the celebration from the early days of the revolution among the urban poor - as the Baath party free them from the old bosses. Followed by images of the strange Baath state that Assad then created in Syria. It was centred round countless images of Assad as a the heroic leader of the nation. It is very odd because, unlike Saddam who was doing the same sort of thing in Iraq, in every image and statue Assad looks like a middle manager.

Assad believed that this ruthless exercise of power was necessary because of the deep sectarian divisions. It was a strange echo of the American diplomat in 1949 who believed that a military coup was needed to "quarantine" the Syrian people - because Assad believed that the naked exercise of power by an elite was necessary to enforce a genuinely plural society. To quarantine the Syrians from their sectarian past.

And many Syrians greeted it with a sigh of relief after the relentless chaos and violence of the past twenty years. They welcomed the stable state Assad created for fear of the alternative - and as a result he became popular with millions of Syrians.

But what he had also created was a repressive state that resorted to violence and fear to maintain its rule.

But he wasn't successfull, Hama is yet again one of the main centres of the revolt against Assad's son's regime.

Nobody knows what is going to happen in Syria today. The optimistic view is that a new generation is emerging who really want a proper representative democracy in which all groups can negotiate with each other without violence. The pessimistic view is that those sectarian divisions, encouraged by the French - and then incubated further by the Assad family - will re-emerge. In truth no-one knows.

But there is a terrible naivety in the West's view of the ongoing revolt in Syria. It forgets its own history and the role it played in helping create the present situation.

Back in the 1950s America set out to create democracy in Syria, but it led to disaster. It was by no means the only factor that led to the violence and horror of the Assad dictatorship, but its unforeseen consequences played an important role in shaping the feverish paranoia in Syria in the late 1950s - which helped the Baath party come to power. And while the Western powers no longer remember this history, the Syrians surely do.

The man who had originally created the Baath vision, Michel Aflaq, was forced into exile in Iraq. He died in 1989 - a sad man, convinced that Assad had destroyed his dream of a united, confident Arab world.


The Iraqi Baaths hated the Syrian Baaths and they embraced the exiled Aflaq. After he died they built a grand mausoleum for him in Bagdhad. Here is a photo of what had happened to the mausoleum by 2006. It had been turned into a gym for the invading American troops. You can see Aflaq's tomb behind the weights and the table football.

One idea of personal transformation had been replaced by another.



Abouth author
Adam Curtis is a documentary film maker, whose work includes The Power of Nightmares, The Century of the Self, The Mayfair Set, Pandora's Box, The Trap and The Living Dead.

Brilliant Adam Curtis documentaries

The Power of Nightmares, (Part 1/3), “Baby it's Cold Outside“

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The Power of Nightmares Part 2: The Phantom Victory

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The Power of Nightmares, (Part 3/3), “The Shadows in the Cave

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The Mayfair Set

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The Century Of The Self

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To many in both business and government, the triumph of the self is the ultimate expression of democracy, where power is truly moved into the hands of the people. Certainly the people may feel they are in charge, but are they really? The Century of the Self by Adam Curtis tells the untold and controversial story of the growth of the mass-consumer society. How is the all-consuming self created, by whom, and in whose interest?

The Freud dynasty is at the heart of this compelling social history. Sigmund Freud, founder of psychoanalysis; Edward Bernays, who invented public relations; Anna Freud, Sigmund's devoted daughter; and present-day PR guru and Sigmund's great grandson, Matthew Freud. Sigmund Freud's work into the bubbling and murky world of the subconscious changed the world. By introducing a technique to probe the unconscious mind, Freud provided useful tools for understanding the secret desires of the masses. Unwittingly, his work served as the precursor to a world full of political spin doctors, marketing moguls, and society's belief that the pursuit of satisfaction and happiness is man's ultimate goal....Check out this post with more info. about them and The Tavistock Institute: http://bc.vc/aR2kK

Pandora's Box [Part 1: The Engineer's Plot]

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This episode details how the Bolshevik revolutionaries who came into power in 1917 attempted to industrialize and control the Soviet Union with rational scientific methods. The Bolsheviks wanted to turn the Soviet people into scientific beings. Aleksei Gastev used social engineering, including a social engineering machine, to make people more rational.

But Bolshevik politicians and bourgeois engineers came into conflict. Lenin said: "The communists are not directing anything, they are being directed." Stalin arrested 2000 engineers in 1930, eight of which were convicted in the Industrial Party show trial. Engineering schools gave those loyal to the party only limited training in engineering, to minimize their potential political influence. Industrialized America was used as a template to develop the Soviet Union. Magnitogorsk was built to closely replicate the steel mill city Gary, Indiana. A former worker describes how they went so far as to create metal trees since trees could not grow on the steppe.

By the late 1930s, Stalin faithful engineers like Leonid Brezhnev, Alexei Kosygin and Nikita Khrushchev grew in influence, due to Stalin eliminating many earlier Bolshevik engineers. They aimed to use engineering in line with Stalin's policies to plan the entire country. At Gosplan, the head institution of central planning, engineers predicted future rational needs. Vitalii Semyonovich Lelchuk, from the USSR Academy of Sciences, describes the level of detail as absurd: "Even the KGB was told the quota of arrests to be made and the prisons to be used. The demand for coffins, novels and movies was all planned." The seemingly rational benchmarks began to have unexpected results. When the plan measured tonnes carried per kilometers, trains went long distances just to meet the quota. Sofas and chandeliers increased in size to meet measurements of material usage.

When Nikita Khrushchev took over after Stalin he tried to make improvements, including considering prices in the plan. The head of the USSR State Committee for Organization and Methodology of Price Creation is shown with a tall stack of price logbooks declaring that "This shows quite clearly that the system is rational." Academician Victor Glushkov proposed the use of cybernetics to control people as a remedy for the problems of planning. In the 60s computers began being used to process economic data. Consumer demand was calculated by computers from data gathered by surveys. But the time delay in the system meant that items were no longer in demand by the time they had been produced.

When Leonid Brezhnev and Alexei Kosygin took over in the mid 60s, the economy of the Soviet Union was stagnating. By 1978 the country was in full economic crisis. Production had devolved to "pointless, elaborate ritual" and endeavours to improve the plan had been abandoned. Quote the narrator: "What had begun as a grand moral attempt to build a rational society ended by creating a bizarre, bewildering existence for millions of Soviet people".

Pandora's Box [Part 2: To The Brink of Eternity]

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This episode outlines how the US government attempted to use systems analysis and game theory to develop strategies to control the nuclear threat and nuclear arms race during the Cold War.

The focus is on the men of the on whom Dr Strangelove was allegedly based: Herman Kahn, Albert Wohlstetter and John von Neumann. These were people who believed that the world could be controlled by the scientific manipulation of fear - mathematical analysts employed by the American RAND Corporation. In the end, their visions were the stuff of science fiction fantasy.

Features several interview segments with Sam Cohen outlining his experiences at RAND. He is the inventor of the neutron bomb and was with RAND 1947-1975.

Also features George Ball, the Under-Secretary of State in the Kennedy administration 1961-1966, and William Gorham,[1] RAND Corporation Asst. Sec. Dept. Health, Education & Welfare 1956-68.

Also features an interview with science fiction author Larry Niven, who was instrumental in the creating of the Star Wars policies of Ronald Reagan.

Also features Robert McNamara, Thomas Schelling, Edward Teller and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Similar material is also covered in the "Fuck You Buddy" part of Curtis' later series, The Trap, but To The Brink of Eternity has the focus entirely on the nuclear and military aspects of Cold War strategy. John Nash is not mentioned and the psychological and economical aspects of game theory are not included.

Pandora's Box [Part 3: The League of Gentlemen]

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This film focuses on how both the Conservative and Labour governments of the 1960s attempted to use economists to engineer economic growth to specific targets, as well as programme post-war economic management in the United Kingdom, and attempts to prevent relative economic decline and the perception of the 1960s Wilson governments that devaluation would jeopardize against national self-esteem.

By the mid 1970s, stagflation emerged to confound the Keynesian theories used by policy makers. Meanwhile, a group of economists had managed to convince Margaret Thatcher, Keith Joseph and other British politicians that they had foolproof technical means to make Britain 'great' again. The stagflation of the 1970s catapulted the then obscure economic theory of Monetarism to the forefront of political thought. By the late 1970s Milton Friedman had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics and even some Labour politicians were claiming that government attempts to grow the economy by injecting capital was causing more harm than good by driving up inflation. In 1979 Margaret Thatcher came to power and began to implement these new economic theories to drive down inflation by cutting government spending and raising interest rates, thus tightening the money supply. However, this failed both to end inflation and caused widespread job loss and industrial decline. By the early 1980s unemployment had risen to 2.5 million, British industrial output had declined by 1/6, and large scale riots had begun to break out in Britain. The Conservative Government decided to abandon the Monetarist project and lowered interest rates in an attempt to create jobs. In fact, by the mid 1980's Ms. Thatcher claimed in a television interview that she had "never subscribed" to the theories of Milton Friedman.

The film ends with many of the economists involved in the ill fated attempts to manage the economy arriving at the same conclusion their predecessors had 30 years before: they could only prevent an economic disaster not engineer growth. Other economists point out that other county's success had more to do with focusing on improving their education systems and industrial bases rather than large scale attempts to engineer the entire nation's economy. Another economist worries that the whole Monetarist project might have simply been an attempt to reduce the economic and political power of the working class by raising unemployment and lowering wages, as he puts it "creating a Reserve army of labor."

Pandora's Box [Part 4: Goodbye Mrs. Ant]

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This part focuses on attitudes to nature and tells the story of the insecticide DDT, which was first seen as a savior to humankind in the 1940s, only to be claimed as a part of the destruction of the entire ecosystem in the late 60s. It also outlines how the sciences of entomology and ecology were transformed by political and economic pressures.

The episode appears to be named after the 1959 film Goodbye, Mrs. Ant.[2] Clips from the 1958 horror movie Earth vs. the Spider and the 1941 grasshopper cartoon Hoppity Goes to Town are also featured.

Insects were a huge problem in the United States and they often ruined entire crops. Emerging in the 1940s DDT and other insecticides seemed to be the solution. As more insecticides were invented, the science of entomology changed focus from insect classification, to primarily testing new insecticides and exterminating insects rather than cataloging them. But as early as 1946-48 entomologists began to notice that insecticides were having a negative impact on other animals, particularly birds.

Chemical companies portrayed the battle against insects as a struggle for existence and their promotional films from the 1950s invoke Charles Darwin. Darwin biographer James Moore notes how the battlefield and life and death aspects of Darwin's theories were emphasized to suit the Cold War years. Scientists believed that they were seizing power from evolution and redirecting it by controlling the environment.

In 1962 biologist Rachel Carson released the book Silent Spring, which was the first serious attack on pesticides and outlined their harmful side effects. It caused a public outcry but had no immediate effect on the use of pesticides. Entomologist Gordon Edwards retells how he made speeches critical of Carson's book. He eats some DDT on camera to show how he'd demonstrate its safety during these talks.

The spraying of DDT in the growing suburbs brought the side effects to the attention of the wealthy and articulate middle classes. Victor Yannacone, a suburbanite and lawyer, helped found the Environmental Defense Fund with the aim to legally challenge the use of pesticides. They argued that the chemicals were becoming more poisonous as they spread, as evidenced by the disappearance of the Peregrine Falcon.

In 1968 they got a hearing on DDT in Madison, Wisconsin. It became headline news, with both sides claiming that everything America stood for was at stake. Biologist Thomas Jukes is shown singing a pro-DDT parody on America the Beautiful he sent to Time magazine at the time of the trial.[3] Hugh Iltis describes how in 1969 a scientist testified at the hearing about how DDT appears in breast milk and accumulate in the fat tissue of babies. This got massive media attention.

Where once chemicals were seen as good, now they were bad. In the late 60s ecology was a marginal science. But Yannacone used ecology as a scientific basis to challenge the DDT defenders' idea of evolution. Similar to how the science of entomology had been changed in the 1950s, ecology was transformed by the social and political pressures of the early 70s. Ecologists became the guardians of the human relationship to nature.

James Moore describes how people try to get Darwin on the side of their view of nature. In The Origin of Species nature is seen as being at war, but also likened to a web of complex relations. Here Darwin gave people a basis for urging us not to take control of nature but cooperate with it. In popular imagination a scientific theory has a single fixed meaning, but in reality it becomes cultural property and is usable by different interested parties.

Twenty years later the story of DDT continues with a press conference announcing the stop of construction in a skyscraper due to a nesting Peregrine Falcon. Ornithologist David Berger criticizes the event for fostering the myth of the sensitivity of nature.

Joan Halifax[4] talks about ecology as a gift to human beings and all species, a moral lesson that gave rise to not utopia, but ecotopia.

Politics Professor Langdon Winner theorizes that social ideals are being read back to us as if they were lessons derived from science itself. The scientific notions of the 1950s, the ideas of endless possibilities for exploitations of nature, are now seen as ill-conceived. And the ideas of ecology today may in 30 or 40 years seem similarly ill-conceived.

The episode ends with a quote from Darwin about seeking divine providence in nature: "I feel most deeply that the whole subject is too profound for the human intellect. A dog might as well speculate on the mind of Newton. Let each man hope and believe what he can."

Pandora's Box [Part 5: Black Power]

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A look at how Kwame Nkrumah, the leader of the Gold Coast (which became Ghana on independence) from 1952 to 1966, set Africa ablaze with his vision of a new industrial and scientific age. At the heart of his dream was to be the huge Volta dam, generating enough power to transform West Africa into an industrialized utopia. A scheme was drawn up together with Kaiser Aluminum, but as his grand experiment took shape, it brought with it dangerous forces Nkrumah could not control, and he slowly watched his metropolis of science sink into corruption and debt.

Pandora's Box [Part 6: A is For Atom]

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This episode was named after a 1953 General Electric propaganda film that explained nuclear power and features artfully chosen footage from this film.[5] The episode is an insight into the history of nuclear power. In the 1950s scientists and politicians thought they could create a different world with a limitless source of nuclear energy. But things began to go wrong. Scientists in America and the Soviet Union were duped into building dozens of potentially dangerous plants. For business reasons, General Electric and Westinghouse decided that the types sold would be versions based on the reactors used in nuclear submarines, but sold with dubious claims made about their cost effectiveness and safety.

However, in 1964, at AEC it was found that while small reactors were safe, the bigger core sizes as used in power plants were potentially susceptible to China syndrome—an accident where the reactor core could melt through the bottom of the reactor containment vessel. A study showed that this could potentially happen, and if it did it would cause very large damages. These concerns were largely kept from the public. The episode goes into some detail over attempts to find solutions for the China Syndrome issue.

In the Soviet Union, reactors were considered too expensive until Brezhnev came to power. Under his reign, Anatoly Petrovich Alexandrov designed cheap reactors that were produced at high speed, with very few safety features, sometimes not even containment vessels. This was publicly criticized by experts, but the experts were sidelined.

In Britain, by 1974, delays of its native advanced gas cooled reactor powerplant caused Britain to adopt the American PWR design of reactors.

However, in America it was being discovered that safety systems that had to work to avoid meltdown could not be guaranteed to work reliably in the complex circumstances in a nuclear reactor. Tests run on the emergency core cooling systems to deal with pipe breaks, performed on AECs test models in Idaho in 1971, repeatedly failed; often the water was forced out of the core under pressure. It was discovered that the theoretical calculations had no correspondence with reality. Nevertheless, they had not necessarily proved that they wouldn't work on a real reactor, so they decided to carry on with mandated safety systems, that the best evidence suggested, may well not function in the event of an accident.

Engineers and scientists and regulators that tried to publicise the potential issues found that their concerns were not published, and these issues remained largely unknown to the public, and nuclear power had a high degree of confidence with the public.

Then came the disasters of Three Mile Island in 1979 and Chernobyl in 1986 which changed public views on the safety of this new technology. It revealed that the industry had hid the problems and unpredictable nature of these types of reactors, and that they had imposed risks on the public, without consultation.

The documentary ends with the points that the forms of the reactors were chosen only for business reasons. There are very broad range of scientific and engineering options which were not explored. Therefore, perhaps nuclear power should be led by public decisions and redeveloped, but from a more morality-centred point of view.

The Trap 1 - Fuc k You Buddy

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This is another brilliant Adam Curtis documentary originally produced for the BBC. It talks about the modern political realities, where the policies came from and the massive failures of those ideals and how they have ended up exactly where they did not want to be. The series consists of three one-hour programmes which explore the concept and definition of freedom, specifically, "how a simplistic model of human beings as self-seeking, almost robotic, creatures led to today's idea of freedom.

The Trap - 2 - The Lonely Robot

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This episode focuses on the 1990's and how the politicians decided to apply the model of a free market economy to the rest of society and consequences of these actions being felt all over the world in wesetern democracy's.

The Trap - 3 - We Will Force U 2 Be Free

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In this episode we discuss the alternative idea to freedom that currently exists and traps the western societies in which we live.

The Living Dead 1/3: On the Desperate Edge of Now

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On the Desperate Edge of Now- This episode examined how the various national memories of the Second World War were effectively rewritten and manipulated in the Cold War period. For Germany, this began at the Nuremberg Trials, where attempts were made to prevent the Nazis in the dock—principally Hermann Göring—from offering any rational argument for what they had done. Subsequently, however, bringing lower-ranking Nazis to justice was effectively forgotten about in the interests of maintaining West Germany as an ally in the Cold War. For the Allied countries, faced with a new enemy in the Soviet Union, there was a need to portray WW2 as a crusade of pure good against pure evil, even if this meant denying the memories of the Allied soldiers who had actually done the fighting, and knew it to have been far more complex. A number of American veterans told how years later they found themselves plagued with the previously-suppressed memories of the brutal things they had seen and done. The title comes from a veteran's description of what the uncertainty of survival while combat is like

The Living Dead 2/3: You Have Used Me as a Fish Long Enough

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You Have Used Me as a Fish Long Enough- In this episode, the history of brainwashing and mind control was examined. The angle pursued by Curtis was the way in which psychiatry pursued tabula rasa theories of the mind, initially in order to set people free from traumatic memories and then later as a potential instrument of social control. The work of Ewen Cameron was surveyed, with particular reference to Cold War theories of communist brainwashing and the search for hypnoprogammed assassins. The programme's thesis was that the search for control over the past via medical intervention had had to be abandoned and that in modern times control over the past is more effectively exercised by the manipulation of history. Some film from this episode, an interview with one of Cameron's victims, was later re-used by Curtis in his The Century of the Self. The title of this episode comes from a paranoid schizophrenic seen in archive film in the programme, who believed her neighbours were using her as a source of amusement by denying her any privacy, like a pet goldfish

The Living Dead 3/3: The Attic

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The Attic- In this episode, the Imperial aspirations of Margaret Thatcher were examined. The way in which Mrs Thatcher used public relations in an attempt to emulate Winston Churchill in harking back to Britain's "glorious past" to fulfil a political or national end. The title is a reference to the attic flat at the top of 10 Downing Street, which was created during Thatcher's period refurbishment of the house, which did away with the Prime Minister's previous living quarters on lower floors. Scenes from The Innocents (film) the adaptation of The Turn of the Screw by Henry James are intercut with Thatcher's reign.