ANOTHER OCEAN APART
I talked before about my interest in Adam Curtis documentaries.
When I first hit the web grabbing all that I could find, the works
that he was involved with prior to Pandora's Box seemed not to have
reached the internet. I've discovered now a lot of these have since
made it to YouTube, and I'm now into the first two episodes of "An
Ocean Apart", from 1988. It is presented by David Dimbleby rather
than through Curtis' own omnipresent narration characteristic of
his later works, and is much more restrained than his more recent
productions, yet still I'm sure bears his mark throughout. More
importantly though, the story it tells is quite fascinating and
highlights many important historical facts and events that are
commonly either overlooked or understated.
It's subject is the geopolitics of Britain and America throughout
the 20th century, or as they (one might even suppose Curtis) more
enticingly put it:
"When the 20th century opened, Britain dominated world affairs, and
America stood on the sidelines. Now their positions are reversed.
This is the story of how it happened."
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLwOdBR6SDRHTScoFtrSdKheMiZdqJtV7w
At just two hours in to the full seven parts of VHS-ripped BBC
brilliance, I have only so far covered the first world war and the
1920s. What is already painted more vividly than ever though is how
the United States rose to economic and political dominance only on
the back of long, bitterly forced, change to their previous
insistence on the principals of non-intervention. The wealth
brought by fuelling the wars of other nations.
The stance of America before the second world war, and this is
reflected also in a book on the Spanish civil war that I am
currently reading, is remarkably contradictory with the the
policies that would follow through the cold war and beyond the time
of the documentary into the present day. It is the death of an
isolationism that Trump has been attempting now to restore. But a
death through which a globally dominate America was born.
The nation that's now the greatest challenge to this power, both
economically and politically, was then no more of an influence on
the greater world as it was a curiosity viewed by it:
https://archive.org/details/98064NativeShanghaiMosVwr
As the second world war gave America a new vision to shape and
preserve other nations in its image, China was to be transformed by
Mao's brutal Communist leadership that while fanatically embracing
modernisation, retained a traditional isolationism that had been
largely adhered to for centuries. The country passed through much
of the cold war still as a (now forbidden) mystery to western eyes,
and attempting little reach into the affairs of distant lands.
Yet since the documentary told how Britain's power ebbed to America
through the cost of fighting two world wars, China has now risen to
dominance by itself breaking with its long tradition of isolation
and fuelling not the needs of war, but the demands of America's
capitalist greed. Having caught up with the technology of the west,
China now sustains America and the world with materials not for
war, but for modern life. At the same time owning the largest
foreign share of US government debt.
Unleashed from its cage, China is also now following the path of
expansionism and political influence across the globe. Like the
United States after WWII, bringing its global influence from the
economic realm into the political reality.
Where next? What is the destiny of such a nation that suddenly
jumps on the back of a greater, if declining, world power and rides
until ready itself to overtake? If there really is one answer, then
I couldn't hope to guess it. But for Britain and its empire,
distant historical enemy of both countries, its own decline that
permitted America's rise would prove irreversible.
- The Free Thinker
