Adam Curtis's second major series argues that governments and institutions rewrite the past to serve present needs, tracing the idea across three films about national and personal memory. The first episode, "On the Desperate Edge of Now," takes its title from a veteran's description of combat, and follows how memories of the Second World War were reshaped once the Cold War began. In Germany that process starts at the Nuremberg Trials, where prosecutors worked to stop Hermann Göring from mounting a coherent defense, and continues as prosecuting lower-ranking Nazis quietly stopped mattering once West Germany became a Cold War ally. On the Allied side, the war gets recast as a clean fight between good and evil, a version that clashes with what soldiers actually remembered. American veterans describe decades of suppressed memory resurfacing later in life, the brutal details returning long after the official story had already hardened into place. Curtis builds the argument entirely from archival footage and testimony rather than a stated thesis upfront.