Tuesday 6 March 2012, 15:45  Adam Curtis Adam Curtis  Tagged
with:  When you bring God into politics very strange things
happen. You can see this now in both America and Iran - in their
elections and also in the growing confrontation between them.
But it wasn't always like this - in fact for most of the 20th
century fundamentalist religion in both America and Iran had
turned its back on the world of politics and power.  But in the
1970s everything changed. For that was the moment when religion
was deliberately brought into politics in both countries with
the aim of using it as a revolutionary force. And those who did
this - Khomeini in Iran, and right-wing activists in America -
were inspired by the revolutionary theories and organisations of
the left and their ambition to transform society in a radical
way.  I want to tell the forgotten story of how this happened -
and how in the 1980s both the Americans and the Iranian
idealists came together in a very odd way - with disastrous
consequences.  In the early 1