As he researches each new movie, you can hear folks whispering in Adam Curtis' ear, "That's OK as far as you went but this is what is the underlying philosophy is about". Like any good series, while each stands on its own, you will get more by following Curtis' entire path down the rabbit hole starting with "Pandora's Box" to "the Mayfair Set" "the Century of the Self" and "The Power of Nightmares" (research to collect the names shows more, but I have not managed to find them).<br /><br />At each step along the way, he has long interviews with the actual people, stating plainly what is well understood to be their positions, so it is hard to lay a claim of subterfuge, or twisting of facts.<br /><br />The spoiler if there could be one is that while a dichotomy grew up as a discussion about "Positive vs Negative Freedom" the discussion was one sided and delusional, and in the end based on the mathematics of the brilliant but paranoid schizophrenic John Nash, whose beautiful arithmetic had only one flaw, it only worked if everyone was at least as much a brilliant paranoid schizophrenic as he was. Despite much research that demonstrated that the results were in error, the math was so compelling that an entire Ideology grew up around it.<br /><br />As much research published elsewhere on the web (Google Authoritarian RWA SDO)has demonstrated, RWA's are very attracted by the comfort of easy ideology, and SRO's are very attracted to anything that will attract RWA's, and that same research has shown that this is always a bad thing. Perhaps I jump ahead of Curtis here and suggest the next movie he should do, but it is directly in his trajectory.<br /><br />In reading and in part a response to IMDB-5601, his response has many classic RWA examples. Curtis makes a point about the flaw noted above, and gives examples of research that demonstrated the fallacy. Googling the points above will give many more examples.<br /><br />As to the origins of Islamist extremism, his previous "Power of Nightmares" dealt with that in great detail, but as he points out, the Iraqis were never a part of the Islamists and were hated by them. And despite the invasion might have made a go of it had the extremists in the Bush Administration not tried to play Mad Scientist and experiment on them with their Social Ideologies, that failed utterly, creating the expected reaction of an outraged populace, thus opening a place for the Islamists to come in.<br /><br />On the home front Curtis makes the point again that the Ideology is destroying both Freedom, and the Economy, and ultimately Civilization itself, and will not be stopped without a clear understanding of the complexities that were understood, but have been discredited in the rush to fit everything into the narrow Ideology.<br /><br />My own Blog at http://freedemocrat.blogspot.com/ follows many of these intellectual threads and offers a vision of an alternative to the Neocon Ideology that is not the classic "liberal" ideology though most progressive ideals end up in the results. Mostly it does this by addressing a central flaw in Libertarian logic.