"The Living Dead" - 3 films about the manipulation of memory and history.

It was Winston Churchill himself who said that "history is written by the victors." One might go further to say that history is also manipulated, simplified, and, in some cases, literally blown to bits by the victors. What you know about Nazi Germany circa World War 2 is probably more or less true, but it is also probably very incomplete. In Part 1 of The Living Dead, Adam Curtis explores how the national memory about what happened in World War 2 was twisted to tell a very particular story. Emerging Cold War politics and human optimism facilitated that World War 2 be cast as a valiant struggle of good versus evil.

So what? What was lost was the story of how an entire nation was -- and could ever possibly become -- complicit in horrible crimes against humanity. What was lost was the story of how fascism is latent in every human being. What the world got instead was a tale of monsters and saviors, a black and white picture of humanity as naturally good, and a dismissal of the idea that darkness can bubble up in every person.

You can view part 1 here:



Links and summaries for all three parts are posted below. For now, they are available free online and without commercials.

The Living Dead (1995)

PART 1 :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."

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PART 2: 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."

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Part 3: 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."