I heartily recommend that you all take 3 hours out of your lives to watch the following documentary series recently put out on the BBC entitled "The Power Of Nightmares". I strongly doubt this will ever air on US television. It chronicles the rise to power of the neoconservatives in the west, and the islamists in the east on the back of fearsome myths of their own creation. Its premise is that politicians failed to live up to the promises of their ideologies in the early part of the 20th century and lost control over their citizens, and have attempted to regain that control using mythical threats from invisible, intangible sources. It makes such startling claims as denying the existence of Al Qaeda in the form in which we know it from media reports and political proclamation. Broadband, bittorrent required...

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3