The Confession: The Untold Story of The "War on Terror"
The Confession is a documentary film produced by Ashish Ghadiali, in which he interviews Moazzam Begg, a British ex-Guantanamo detainee who was released without charge in 2005. The documentary unequivocally reveals the reasons behind the rise of the "Modern Jihad".
The documentary film was rudimentary in terms of its production, with no dramatic sound, light or special effects. It was literally a talking head for 90 minutes. However, this talking head of Begg and the untold story he shared was amply powerful in its authenticity and credibility. It was not told by writers from a money-spinning silver screen industry, but by the eyes that witnessed a generation of conflict from the Gulf war, Bosnian genocide and the Chechen war to the war on Afghanistan. In this documentary, Begg was effectively able to take the viewers with him in his life journey with its hodgepodge of thoughts and emotions.
We, the British public, are constantly told that the "War on Terror" is not a choice but a necessity to protect us and our interests from the undeveloped, backward and malevolent 'Jihadis', 'terrorists', 'Islamic fundamentalists' and 'radicals'. We have instantly and uncritically accepted this narrative that is crafted by the establishment, equipped by a multi-million arms industry and the neoconservative lobbyists that go hand in hand with the rise of Islamophobia nationally and globally.
The narrative of the "War on Terror" was crafted through the stories of self, of us and of now, creating a sense of urgency after a crisis, which in our case is the atrocity of 9/11 and provoking us to take action manifested in the "War on terror" by capitalising on our emotions of anger, frustration and despair.
This propaganda is derived from the art of public opinion engineering, whereby our minds are moulded and our imbibed ideas are suggested largely by a small number of powerful people who understand our mental processes and social patterns and who pull the wires which control the docile public mind, making us believe the implausible. This group of powerful individuals can be institutions, think-tanks, lobbyists, and an ally of governments or all together that initiate what is called mimetic warfare.
Dr Robert D. Crane, a former advisor of the US President Richard Nixon, describes this mimetic warfare as a psycho-strategic warfare that uses mimes which can be symbols, slogans or words that are psychologically loaded to manipulate the public sub-conscious to produce a desired result. Such mimetic warfare is designed to achieve victory over a perceived enemy they themselves might create to give them a purpose of existence and to further their economic and political interests.
Most nation states live on such mimetic warfare. Mussolini, the Italian fascist, propagated that Italy is a prisoner in the Mediterranean because Italy lacked control over geo-strategic regions such as Gibraltar and the Suez Canal and therefore Italy ought to start a war. Italians believed this narrative so much so they melted wedding rings in an effort to contribute to the war that killed almost 100,000 Libyans who were perceived wrongly as the enemy.
Once Communism was the bogeyman of Western liberalism and when it imploded, the so called 'Islamic' terrorism became a handy enemy especially after 9/11, perceiving it as an existential threat to the free world, dragging our country into the war mires of Afghanistan and Iraq, killing approximately 2 million civilians in the last 15 years of the "War on Terror" (as stated in a landmark study, released in 2015 by Washington DC-based Physicians for Social Responsibility).
So is our British government showing us duplicity in its realm and approach? What if all of what we were told and believed were nothing but fallacy? Were there ways of avoiding killing 2 million civilians? Was the "War on Terror" an exclusive necessity or a choice to further the interests of the few? How did 'Islamic' terrorism or "Modern Jihad" come about and what provoked it? Did our government play a role in the ascent of "Modern Jihad"?
All these questions were highlighted by the untold story of Moazzam Begg in The Confession that did not only challenge the government-supported, widely-spread narrative of the "War on Terror" but dismantled it.
His story is the perpetually overlooked pith of the matter, that perhaps; the only way to end terrorism is to stop doing it. For that, one cannot but laud Begg for his an inimitable courage in his cause, to have a more answerable government and hold MI5 and MI6 to account.