Posted on 06/25/2004 8:40:23 AM PDT by OPS4
Sneers and Jeers By Christopher Hitchens 26jun04
MICHAEL Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 is a sinister exercise in moral frivolity, crudely disguised as an exercise in seriousness. It is also a spectacle of abject political cowardice masking itself as a demonstration of dissenting bravery.
At no point does Moore make the smallest effort to be objective. At no moment does he pass up the chance of a cheap sneer or a jeer. He pitilessly focuses his camera, for minutes after he should have turned it off, on a distraught and bereaved mother whose grief we have already shared. But, then, this is the guy who thought it so clever and amusing to catch Charlton Heston, in Bowling for Columbine, at the onset of his senile dementia. Such courage.
Fahrenheit 9/11 makes the following points about Osama bin Laden and about Afghanistan, and makes them in this order:
The bin Laden family (if not Osama himself) had a close, if convoluted, business relationship with the Bush family through the Carlyle Group (of former world leaders).
Saudi capital in general is a very large element of foreign investment in the US.
The Unocal company in Texas had been willing to discuss a gas pipeline across Afghanistan with the Taliban, as had other vested interests.
The Bush administration sent far too few ground troops to Afghanistan and thus allowed far too many Taliban and al-Qa'ida members to escape.
The Afghan Government, in supporting the coalition in Iraq, was purely risible in that its non-army was purely American.
The American lives lost in Afghanistan have been wasted. (This I divine from the fact that this supposedly anti-war film is dedicated ruefully to all those killed there, as well as in Iraq.)
It must be evident to anyone, despite the rapid-fire way in which Moore's direction eases the audience hastily past the contradictions, that these discrepant scatter shots do not cohere at any point.
Either the Saudis run US policy (through family ties or economic interest) or they do not. As allies and patrons of the Taliban regime, they either opposed George W. Bush's removal of it or they did not. Either we sent too many troops or were wrong to send any at all - the latter was Moore's view as late as 2002 - or we sent too few. If we were going to make sure no Taliban or al-Qa'ida forces escaped, we would have had to be more ruthless than I suspect Moore is really recommending. And these are simply observations on what is in the film.
If we turn to the facts left out, we discover that there is an emerging Afghan army, that the country is now a joint NATO responsibility and thus under the protection of the broadest military alliance in history, that it has a new constitution and is preparing against hellish odds to hold a general election, and that at least 1.5million of its former refugees have opted to return.
I don't think a pipeline is being constructed yet, not that Afghanistan couldn't do with a pipeline. But a highway from Kabul to Kandahar - an insurance against warlordism and a condition of nation-building - is nearing completion with infinite labour and risk.
We also discover that the parties of the Afghan secular Left - like the parties of the Iraqi secular Left - are strongly in favour of the regime change. But this is not the sort of irony in which Moore chooses to deal.
He prefers leaden sarcasm to irony and, indeed, may not appreciate the distinction. In a long and paranoid (and tedious) section at the opening of the film, he makes heavy innuendoes about the flights that took members of the bin Laden family out of the country after September11. I banged on about this myself at the time and wrote a column in US magazine The Nation drawing attention to a grovelling Larry King interview with the insufferable Saudi ambassador to the US Prince Bandar, which Moore excerpts.
However, recent developments have not been kind to our Mike. In the interval between Moore's triumph at Cannes and the release of the film in the US, the September 11 commission has found nothing to complain of in the timing or arrangement of the flights. And Richard Clarke, Bush's former chief of counter-terrorism, has come forward to say that he, and he alone, took the responsibility for authorising those Saudi departures.
This might not matter so much to the ethos of Fahrenheit 9/11, except that - as you might expect - Clarke is presented throughout as the brow-furrowed ethical hero of the entire post-September11 moment.
And it does not seem very likely that, in his open admission about the bin Laden family evacuation, Clarke is taking a fall or a spear in the chest for the Bush administration. So that's another bust for this windy and bloated cinematic "key to all mythologies".
A film that bases itself on a big lie and a big misrepresentation can sustain itself only by a dizzying succession of smaller falsehoods, beefed up by wilder and (if possible) yet more contradictory claims. Bush is accused of taking too many lazy vacations. But the shot of him "relaxing at Camp David" shows him side by side with Tony Blair. I say shows, even though this photograph is on screen so briefly that if you sneeze or blink you won't recognise the other figure. A meeting with the Prime Minister of Britain, or at least with this Prime Minister, is not a goof-off.
The President is also captured in a well-worn TV news clip on a golf course, making a boiler-plate response to a question on terrorism, then asking the reporters to watch his drive. Well, that's what you get if you catch the President on a golf course. If Dwight Eisenhower had done this, as he often did, it would have been presented as calm statesmanship. If Bill Clinton had done it, as he often did, it would have shown his charm.
More interesting is the moment where Bush is shown frozen on his chair at the infants school in Florida, looking stunned and useless for seven whole minutes after the news of the second plane on September 11. Many are those who say that he should have leaped from his stool, adopted a Russell Crowe stance and gone to work. I could even wish that myself. But if he had done any such thing, then half the Michael Moore community would now be calling him a man who went to war on a hectic, crazed impulse. The other half would be saying what they already say - that he knew the attack was coming, was using it to cement himself in power and couldn't wait to get on with his coup.
We are introduced to Iraq, a "sovereign nation". In this peaceable kingdom, according to Moore's flabbergasting choice of film shots, children are flying little kites, shoppers are smiling in the sunshine and the gentle rhythms of life are undisturbed. Then - wham! From the night sky come the terror weapons of US imperialism. Watching the clips Moore uses, and recalling them well, I can recognise various Saddam palaces and military and police centres getting the treatment. But these sites are not identified as such. In fact, I don't think Al-Jazeera would, on a bad day, have transmitted anything so utterly propagandistic.
The "insurgent" side is presented in this film as justifiably outraged, whereas the 30-year record of Baathist war crimes and repression is not mentioned once. (Actually, that's not quite right. It is briefly mentioned but only, and smarmily, because of the bad period when Washington preferred Saddam Hussein to the likewise unmentioned Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.)
That this - his pro-American moment - was the worst Moore could say of Saddam's depravity is further suggested by some astonishing falsifications. Moore asserts that Iraq under Saddam had never attacked or killed or even threatened (his words) any American.
I never quite know whether Moore is as ignorant as he looks. Baghdad was for years the official, undisguised home address of Abu Nidal, then the most wanted gangster in the world, who had been sentenced to death even by the Palestine Liberation Organisation and had blown up airports in Vienna and Rome.
Baghdad was the safe house for the man whose operation murdered wheelchair-bound Leon Klinghoffer aboard a Mediterranean cruise ship. Saddam boasted publicly of his financial sponsorship of suicide bombers in Israel.
In 1991, a large number of Western hostages were taken by the hideous Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and held in terrible conditions. After that invasion was repelled - Saddam having killed quite a few Americans and Egyptians and Syrians and Brits, and having threatened to kill many more - the Iraqi secret police were caught trying to murder former president George H.W. Bush during his visit to Kuwait. Never mind whether his son should take that personally.
In 2001, Saddam's regime was the only one in the region that openly celebrated the attacks on New York and Washington. Its official media regularly spewed out a stream of anti-Semitic incitement. And it was after, not before, the September 11 attacks that terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi moved from Afghanistan to Baghdad and began to plan his now very open and lethal design for a holy and ethnic civil war.
Thus, despite the film's loaded bias against the work of the mind, you can grasp even while watching it that Moore has just said, in so many words, the one thing that no reflective or informed person can possibly believe: that Saddam was no problem. Now look again at the facts I have cited above. If these things had been allowed to happen under any other administration, you can be sure that Moore and others would now glibly be accusing the president of ignoring, or of having ignored, some unmistakable "warnings".
Circling back to where we began, why did Moore's evil Saudis not join the coalition of the willing? Why instead did they force the US to switch its military headquarters to Qatar? If the Bush family and the al-Saud dynasty live in each other's pockets, as is alleged,, then how come the most reactionary regime in the region has been powerless to stop Bush from demolishing its clone in Kabul and its buffer regime in Baghdad?
The Saudis hate, as they did in 1991, the idea that Iraq's recuperated oil industry might challenge their near monopoly. They fear the liberation of the Shias they so despise. To make these elementary points is to collapse the whole pathetic edifice of the film's theory.
I have already said that Moore's film has the staunch courage to mock Bush for his verbal infelicity. Yet it's much, much braver than that. From Fahrenheit 9/11 you can glean even more astounding and hidden disclosures, such as the capitalist nature of American society, the existence of Eisenhower's military-industrial complex and the use of spin. It's high time someone had the nerve to point this out.
Some people soothingly say that one should relax about all this. It's only a movie. It's no worse than the tomfoolery of Oliver Stone. It might even help get out the youth vote. Yeah, well, I have written and presented about a dozen low-budget TV documentaries on subjects as various as Mother Teresa, Bill Clinton and the Cyprus crisis, and I also helped produce a slightly more polished one on Henry Kissinger that was shown in movie theatres. So I know, thanks, before you tell me, that a documentary must have a point of view and that it must also impose a narrative line.
But if you leave out absolutely everything that might give your narrative a problem and throw in any old rubbish that might support it, and you don't even care that one bit of that rubbish flatly contradicts the next bit, and you give no chance to those who might differ, then you have betrayed your craft.
If you flatter and fawn upon your audience, I might add, you are patronising them and insulting them. By the same token, if I write an article and I quote somebody and for space reasons put in an ellipsis like this (...), I swear on my children that I am not leaving out anything that, if quoted in full, would alter the original meaning or its significance. Those who violate this pact with readers or viewers are to be despised.
Perhaps vaguely aware that his movie so completely lacks gravitas, Moore concludes with a sonorous reading of some words from George Orwell. The words are taken from Nineteen Eighty-Four and consist of a third-person analysis of a hypothetical, endless and contrived war between three superpowers. The clear intention, as clumsily excerpted like this (...) is to suggest that there is no moral distinction between the US, the Taliban, and the Baath party and that the war against jihad is about nothing. If Moore had studied a bit more, or at all, he could have read Orwell saying, and in his own voice, the following:
"The majority of pacifists either belong to obscure religious sects or are simply humanitarians who object to taking life and prefer not to follow their thoughts beyond that point.
"But there is a minority of intellectual pacifists, whose real though unacknowledged motive appears to be hatred of Western democracy and admiration for totalitarianism. Pacifist propaganda usually boils down to saying that one side is as bad as the other, but if one looks closely at the writing of the younger intellectual pacifists, one finds that they do not by any means express impartial disapproval but are directed almost entirely against Britain and the US."
And that's just from Orwell's Notes on Nationalism in May 1945. A short word of advice: it's unwise to quote Orwell if you are already way out of your depth on the question of moral equivalence. It's also incautious to remind people of Orwell if you are engaged in a sophomoric celluloid rewriting of history.
If Moore had been listened to, Afghanistan would still be under Taliban rule and Kuwait would have remained part of Iraq. And Iraq would still be the personal property of a psychopathic crime family. You might hope that a retrospective awareness of this kind would induce a little modesty. To the contrary, it is employed to pump air into one of the great sagging blimps of our sorry, mediocre, celeb-rotten culture. Rock the vote, indeed.
Slate.
Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair. Fahrenheit 9/11 premieres in Australia in late July.
privacy © The Australian
Ops4 God Bless America!
Wow.
The word "evicerated" comes to mind.
I wish all the dimwits who laud this POC would read this piece.
When Hitchins sets his mind to it, very few can annihilate a target as effectively.
Bump for a later read.
CNN radio is doing heavy advertising for Moore today.
I say lets sick our "digital brownshirts" on them.
AND we "would still be the personal property of a psychopathic crime family."
Sarasota principal defends Bush from "Fahrenheit 9/11" portrayal
By Associated Press
June 24, 2004
http://www.naplesnews.com/npdn/florida/article/0,2071,NPDN_14910_2985640,00.html
(excerpted)
SARASOTA — Michael Moore's film "Fahrenheit 9/11" criticizes President Bush for listening to Sarasota second-graders read a story for nearly seven minutes after learning the nation was under attack on Sept. 11, 2001.
But Gwendolyn Tose'-Rigell, the principal at Emma E. Booker Elementary School, says Bush handled himself properly.
"I don't think anyone could have handled it better," Tose'-Rigell told the Sarasota Herald-Tribune in a story published Wednesday. "What would it have served if he had jumped out of his chair and ran out of the room?"
At times Hitchens' views infuriate me, but he is a magnificent writer and a smart man. Perhaps he will complete his glacial creep from Marxist to conservative before he dies.
Sorry but you left out lying, fat, stupid, brainless, anti-American Hog Beast!
Sorry if I left anything out.
Has Hitchens ever liked any American president?
I think the one and only reason he keeps GWB off the hook is that he despises the Saudis, the Baathists, and the Islamists even more.
We've read how many words in this regard from Roger Ebert?
HF
This lying propaganda flick by Moore may well backfire like a lit fart.
(I'll defend that rude simile as apropos)
Good sentiment! I like that! :-)
Ah, the NEA! Despite how supportive her comment of President Bush Principal Tose'-Rigell's comment is, should we not ask why conjugating the past perfect (or, in this case, subjunctive mood, but either way) of "run" is such a challenge for her?
HF
And this was written in 1945? I have to read more Orwell.
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