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Adam Curtis · BBC documentary series · 2004
The Power of Nightmares (2004) is Adam Curtis’s three-part BBC series on how manufactured nightmares become instruments of governance — the parallel rise of the neoconservatives and the Islamists, each feeding on the other’s fear. It is the codex’s crisis-events chapter in documentary form.
The codex is speculative fiction; this source and the record below are real.
Curtis’s argument: after the ideological age, power governs through nightmares — enemies constructed, inflated, and answered with protection. The codex’s ‘crisis events’ panels are this thesis in the plan’s voice.
The series’ signature move is the doubled story: two movements, two mythologies, one machinery of fear between them. The codex’s order-out-of-chaos sections borrow the structure — the chaos is the product, the order is the pitch.
Because it is the BBC’s own rendering of the plan’s logic — archive footage, named officials, no narration-by-suspicion. The record’s most cinematic entry in this Library.
Broadcast on BBC Two in three parts in late 2004; written and directed by Adam Curtis. The series’ claims about the construction of the terror threat were debated widely at the time and are part of the record — the Library carries both the film and the debate.
Chapter II’s crisis-events argument and Transmission XIV’s chaos panels cite Curtis as the documented version of the claim. The Grounded Edition’s note: the mythology’s nightmare logic, delivered by the BBC.
Adam Curtis’s 2004 BBC series on the parallel rise of neoconservatives and Islamists — and how governance by manufactured fear replaced ideology.
It is a BBC documentary arguing a structural thesis from archive footage and named officials — debated as interpretation, not dismissed as fantasy.
The codex’s crisis-events and order-out-of-chaos panels are its thesis in the mythology’s voice — the Grounded Edition shows the borrowing directly.
It circulates freely in the Internet Archive and is linked in the source strip above.
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