The State Ch 4

[DracoM]

How frightening was that?
Barcelona, Nice, Paris, London Bridge etc etc.............? And what we saw on TV is the route to the final solution, is it?

[teamsaint]

More national tv discussion of how IS came to be, it's connections with the ex Iraqi forces officer class or about US relationships with the Saudi regime will Presumably be next on the agenda.

[Serial_Apologist]

More national tv discussion of how IS came to be, it's connections with the ex Iraqi forces officer class or about US relationships with the Saudi regime will Presumably be next on the agenda.

Tariq Ali's book The Clash of Fundamentalisms - Crusade, Jihads and Modernity (Verso, 2002, London - ISBN L-85984-457-X) , offers an excellent and very readable background to the phenomenon of political Islamism, and Adam Curtis's 2004 TV documentary, The Power of Nightmares, similarly outlines the global forces at play, showing Al Qaeda as a virtually spent force in a process of autodestruction prior to Britain and America going to war in Iraq.

I have to say I wasn't terribly impressed by Part 1 of The State last night: the characters, with the exception of the American woman tasked with inducting the "novices", and the men's male minder, who barely speaks at all but just looks menacing, seemed somehow manufactured and unreal. Perhaps that is the whole point, though as someone who was himself once and remains radicalised (in my case by encountering Marxism in the late 1960s) it would be helpful where there something in the make-up of the leading characters one could latch onto or at least partially identify with.

[DracoM]

Well, what did you make of Monday night's epi?

[Serial_Apologist]

Well, what did you make of Monday night's epi?

Unless the plot somehow manages to reveal something of the psychological predisposition of the main protagonists, explaining why or how such ostensibly intelligent young people are taken in, I don't think this series will offer much by the way of entertainment, other than shock and gore.