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<all text below is from today's Michael Moore email - ClassWarz>
A Letter to All Who Voted for George W. Bush from Michael Moore
<snip of loony lib rant>
http://slate.msn.com/id/2102723/
Unfairenheit 9/11
The lies of Michael Moore.
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Monday, June 21, 2004, at 12:26 PM PT
Moore: Trying to have it three ways
One of the many problems with the American left, and indeed of the
American left, has been its image and self-image as something rather
too solemn, mirthless, herbivorous, dull, monochrome, righteous, and
boring. How many times, in my old days at The Nation magazine, did I
hear wistful and semienvious ruminations? Where was the radical Firing
Line show? Who will be our Rush Limbaugh? I used privately to hope
that the emphasis, if the comrades ever got around to it, would be on
the first of those and not the second. But the meetings themselves
were so mind-numbing and lugubrious that I thought the danger of
success on either front was infinitely slight.
Nonetheless, it seems that an answer to this long-felt need is finally
beginning to emerge. I exempt Al Franken's unintentionally funny Air
America network, to which I gave a couple of interviews in its early
days. There, one could hear the reassuring noise of collapsing scenery
and tripped-over wires and be reminded once again that correct
politics and smooth media presentation are not even distant cousins.
With Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, however, an entirely new note
has been struck. Here we glimpse a possible fusion between the turgid
routines of MoveOn.org and the filmic standards, if not exactly the
filmic skills, of Sergei Eisenstein or Leni Riefenstahl.
To describe this film as dishonest and demagogic would almost be to
promote those terms to the level of respectability. To describe this
film as a piece of crap would be to run the risk of a discourse that
would never again rise above the excremental. To describe it as an
exercise in facile crowd-pleasing would be too obvious. 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.
Continue Article
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In late 2002, almost a year after the al-Qaida assault on American
society, I had an onstage debate with Michael Moore at the Telluride
Film Festival. In the course of this exchange, he stated his view that
Osama Bin Laden should be considered innocent until proven guilty.
This was, he said, the American way. The intervention in Afghanistan,
he maintained, had been at least to that extent unjustified.
SomethingI cannot guess what, since we knew as much then as we do
nowhas since apparently persuaded Moore that Osama Bin Laden is as
guilty as hell. Indeed, Osama is suddenly so guilty and so
all-powerful that any other discussion of any other topic is a
dangerous "distraction" from the fight against him. I believe that I
understand the convenience of this late conversion.
Recruiters in Michigan
Fahrenheit 9/11 makes the following points about Bin Laden and about
Afghanistan, and makes them in this order:
1) The Bin Laden family (if not exactly Osama himself) had a close if
convoluted business relationship with the Bush family, through the
Carlyle Group.
2) Saudi capital in general is a very large element of foreign
investment in the United States.
3) The Unocal company in Texas had been willing to discuss a gas
pipeline across Afghanistan with the Taliban, as had other vested
interests.
4) The Bush administration sent far too few ground troops to
Afghanistan and thus allowed far too many Taliban and al-Qaida members
to escape.
5) The Afghan government, in supporting the coalition in Iraq, was
purely risible in that its non-army was purely American.
6) The American lives lost in Afghanistan have been wasted. (This I
divine from the fact that this supposedly "antiwar" 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 U.S. policy (through family ties or overwhelming
economic interest), or they do not. As allies and patrons of the
Taliban regime, they either opposed Bush's removal of it, or they did
not. (They opposed the removal, all right: They wouldn't even let Tony
Blair land his own plane on their soil at the time of the operation.)
Either we sent too many troops, or were wrong to send any at allthe
latter was Moore's view as late as 2002or we sent too few. If we were
going to make sure no Taliban or al-Qaida forces survived or escaped,
we would have had to be more ruthless than I suspect that Mr. Moore is
really recommending. And these are simply observations on what is "in"
the film. If we turn to the facts that are deliberately 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 a million and a half 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
Kandaharan insurance against warlordism and a condition of
nation-buildingis nearing completion with infinite labor and risk. We
also discover that the parties of the Afghan secular leftlike the
parties of the Iraqi secular leftare strongly in favor 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 Sept.
11. I banged on about this myself at the time and wrote a Nation
column drawing attention to the groveling Larry King interview with
the insufferable 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 United
States, the 9/11 commission has found nothing to complain of in the
timing or arrangement of the flights. And Richard Clarke, Bush's
former chief of counterterrorism, has come forward to say that he, and
he alone, took the responsibility for authorizing those Saudi
departures. This might not matter so much to the ethos of Fahrenheit
9/11, except thatas you might expectClarke is presented throughout
as the brow-furrowed ethical hero of the entire post-9/11 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
only sustain itself by a dizzying succession of smaller falsehoods,
beefed up by wilder and (if possible) yet more-contradictory claims.
President Bush is accused of taking too many lazy vacations. (What is
that about, by the way? Isn't he supposed to be an unceasing planner
for future aggressive wars?) 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 recognize the other figure. A meeting with the prime
minister of the United Kingdom, 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 boilerplate response to a question on terrorism and
then asking the reporters to watch his drive. Well, that's what you
get if you catch the president on a golf course. If Eisenhower had
done this, as he often did, it would have been presented as calm
statesmanship. If 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 infant school in Florida, looking stunned
and useless for seven whole minutes after the news of the second plane
on 9/11. 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 (as he did
with his "Let's roll" and "dead or alive" remarks a month later), 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 saythat he knew the attack was coming, was using it to
cement himself in power, and couldn't wait to get on with his coup.
This is the line taken by Gore Vidal and by a scandalous recent book
that also revives the charge of FDR's collusion over Pearl Harbor. At
least Moore's film should put the shameful purveyors of that last
theory back in their paranoid box.
But it won't because it encourages their half-baked fantasies in so
many other ways. We are introduced to Iraq, "a sovereign nation." (In
fact, Iraq's "sovereignty" was heavily qualified by international
sanctions, however questionable, which reflected its noncompliance
with important U.N. resolutions.) 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. Thenwham! From the night sky come
the terror weapons of American imperialism. Watching the clips Moore
uses, and recalling them well, I can recognize various Saddam palaces
and military and police centers 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. You
would also be led to think that the term "civilian casualty" had not
even been in the Iraqi vocabulary until March 2003. I remember asking
Moore at Telluride if he was or was not a pacifist. He would not give
a straight answer then, and he doesn't now, either. I'll just say that
the "insurgent" side is presented in this film as justifiably
outraged, whereas the 30-year record of Baathist war crimes and
repression and aggression 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 to the likewise
unmentioned Ayatollah Khomeini.)
That thishis pro-American momentwas the worst Moore could possibly
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, or even if
that would be humanly possible. 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 PLO and had
blown up airports in Vienna* and Rome. Baghdad was the safe house for
the man whose "operation" murdered Leon Klinghoffer. Saddam boasted
publicly of his financial sponsorship of suicide bombers in Israel.
(Quite a few Americans of all denominations walk the streets of
Jerusalem.) In 1991, a large number of Western hostages were taken by
the hideous Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and held in terrible conditions
for a long time. After that same invasion was repelledSaddam having
killed quite a few Americans and Egyptians and Syrians and Brits in
the meantime and having threatened to kill many morethe Iraqi secret
police were caught trying to murder former President Bush during his
visit to Kuwait. Never mind whether his son should take that
personally. (Though why should he not?) Should you and I not resent
any foreign dictatorship that attempts to kill one of our retired
chief executives? (President Clinton certainly took it that way: He
ordered the destruction by cruise missiles of the Baathist "security"
headquarters.) Iraqi forces fired, every day, for 10 years, on the
aircraft that patrolled the no-fly zones and staved off further
genocide in the north and south of the country. In 1993, a certain Mr.
Yasin helped mix the chemicals for the bomb at the World Trade Center
and then skipped to Iraq, where he remained a guest of the state until
the overthrow of Saddam. In 2001, Saddam's regime was the only one in
the region that openly celebrated the attacks on New York and
Washington and described them as just the beginning of a larger
revenge. Its official media regularly spewed out a stream of
anti-Semitic incitement. I think one might describe that as
"threatening," even if one was narrow enough to think that
anti-Semitism only menaces Jews. And it was after, and not before, the
9/11 attacks that Abu Mussab 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. On Dec. 1, 2003, the New York Times
reportedand the David Kay report had establishedthat Saddam had been
secretly negotiating with the "Dear Leader" Kim Jong-il in a series of
secret meetings in Syria, as late as the spring of 2003, to buy a
North Korean missile system, and missile-production system, right off
the shelf. (This attempt was not uncovered until after the fall of
Baghdad, the coalition's presence having meanwhile put an end to the
negotiations.)
Thus, in spite of the film's loaded bias against the work of the mind,
you can grasp even while watching it that Michael Moore has just said,
in so many words, the one thing that no reflective or informed person
can possibly believe: that Saddam Hussein was no problem. No problem
at all. 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 fairly unmistakable
"warnings."
The same "let's have it both ways" opportunism infects his treatment
of another very serious subject, namely domestic counterterrorist
policy. From being accused of overlooking too many warningsnot
exactly an original pointthe administration is now lavishly taunted
for issuing too many. (Would there not have been "fear" if the
harbingers of 9/11 had been taken seriously?) We are shown some
American civilians who have had absurd encounters with idiotic
"security" staff. (Have you ever met anyone who can't tell such a
story?) Then we are immediately shown underfunded police departments
that don't have the means or the manpower to do any stop-and-search: a
power suddenly demanded by Moore on their behalf that we know by
definition would at least lead to some ridiculous interrogations.
Finally, Moore complains that there isn't enough intrusion and
confiscation at airports and says that it is appalling that every air
traveler is not forcibly relieved of all matches and lighters. (Cue
mood music for sinister influence of Big Tobacco.) Sohe wants even
more pocket-rummaging by airport officials? Uh, no, not exactly. But
by this stage, who's counting? Moore is having it three ways and
asserting everything and nothing. Againsimply not serious.
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 United
States to switch its regional military headquarters to Qatar? If the
Bush family and the al-Saud dynasty live in each other's pockets, as
is alleged in a sort of vulgar sub-Brechtian scene with Arab
headdresses replacing top hats, 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
Shiite Muslims they so despise. To make these elementary points is to
collapse the whole pathetic edifice of the film's "theory." Perhaps
Moore prefers the pro-Saudi Kissinger/Scowcroft plan for the Middle
East, where stability trumps every other consideration and where one
dare not upset the local house of cards, or killing-field of Kurds?
This would be a strange position for a purported radical. Then again,
perhaps he does not take this conservative line because his real pitch
is not to any audience member with a serious interest in foreign
policy. It is to the provincial isolationist.
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" in the presentation of our politicians. It's high time
someone had the nerve to point this out. There's more. Poor people
often volunteer to join the army, and some of them are duskier than
others. Betcha didn't know that. Back in Flint, Mich., Moore feels on
safe ground. There are no martyred rabbits this time. Instead, it's
the poor and black who shoulder the packs and rifles and march away. I
won't dwell on the fact that black Americans have fought for almost a
century and a half, from insisting on their right to join the U.S.
Army and fight in the Civil War to the right to have a desegregated
Army that set the pace for post-1945 civil rights. I'll merely ask
this: In the film, Moore says loudly and repeatedly that not enough
troops were sent to garrison Afghanistan and Iraq. (This is now a
favorite cleverness of those who were, in the first place, against
sending any soldiers at all.) Well, where does he think those needful
heroes and heroines would have come from? Does he favor a draftthe
most statist and oppressive solution? Does he think that only hapless
and gullible proles sign up for the Marines? Does he thinkas he seems
to suggestthat parents can "send" their children, as he stupidly asks
elected members of Congress to do? Would he have abandoned Gettysburg
because the Union allowed civilians to pay proxies to serve in their
place? Would he have supported the antidraft (and very antiblack)
riots against Lincoln in New York? After a point, one realizes that
it's a waste of time asking him questions of this sort. It would be
too much like taking him seriously. He'll just try anything once and
see if it floats or flies or gets a cheer.
Trying to talk congressmen into sending their sons to war
Indeed, Moore's affected and ostentatious concern for black America is
one of the most suspect ingredients of his pitch package. In a recent
interview, he yelled that if the hijacked civilians of 9/11 had been
black, they would have fought back, unlike the stupid and presumably
cowardly white men and women (and children). Never mind for now how
many black passengers were on those planeswe happen to know what
Moore does not care to mention: that Todd Beamer and a few of his
co-passengers, shouting "Let's roll," rammed the hijackers with a
trolley, fought them tooth and nail, and helped bring down a United
Airlines plane, in Pennsylvania, that was speeding toward either the
White House or the Capitol. There are no words for real, impromptu
bravery like that, which helped save our republic from worse than
actually befell. The Pennsylvania drama also reminds one of the
self-evident fact that this war is not fought only "overseas" or in
uniform, but is being brought to our cities. Yet Moore is a silly and
shady man who does not recognize courage of any sort even when he sees
it because he cannot summon it in himself. To him, easy applause, in
front of credulous audiences, is everything.
Moore has announced that he won't even appear on TV shows where he
might face hostile questioning. I notice from the New York Times of
June 20 that he has pompously established a rapid response team, and a
fact-checking staff, and some tough lawyers, to bulwark himself
against attack. He'll sue, Moore says, if anyone insults him or his
pet. Some right-wing hack groups, I gather, are planning to bring
pressure on their local movie theaters to drop the film. How dumb or
thuggish do you have to be in order to counter one form of stupidity
and cowardice with another? By all means go and see this terrible
film, and take your friends, and if the fools in the audience strike
up one cry, in favor of surrender or defeat, feel free to join in the
conversation.
However, I think we can agree that the film is so flat-out phony that
"fact-checking" is beside the point. And as for the scary lawyersget
a life, or maybe see me in court. But I offer this, to Moore and to
his rapid response rabble. Any time, Michael my boy. Let's redo
Telluride. Any show. Any place. Any platform. Let's see what you're
made of.
Some people soothingly say that one should relax about all this. It's
only a movie. No biggie. It's no worse than the tomfoolery of Oliver
Stone. It's kick-ass entertainment. It might even help get out "the
youth vote." Yeah, well, I have myself written and presented about a
dozen low-budget made-for-TV documentaries, on subjects as various as
Mother Teresa and Bill Clinton and the Cyprus crisis, and I also
helped produce a slightly more polished one on Henry Kissinger that
was shown in movie theaters. So I know, thanks, before you tell me,
that a documentary must have a "POV" or 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 potential audience, I might add, you
are patronizing 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. At no point does Michael 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.
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 1984 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
United States, 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 really 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 United States
And that's just from Orwell's Notes on Nationalism in May 1945. A
short word of advice: In general, it's highly 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 recent history.
If Michael Moore had had his way, Slobodan Milosevic would still be
the big man in a starved and tyrannical Serbia. Bosnia and Kosovo
would have been cleansed and annexed. If Michael Moore had been
listened to, Afghanistan would still be under Taliban rule, and Kuwait
would have remained part of Iraq. And Iraq itself would still be the
personal property of a psychopathic crime family, bargaining covertly
with the slave state of North Korea for WMD. 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.
Correction, June 22, 2004: This piece originally referred to terrorist
attacks by Abu Nidal's group on the Munich and Rome airports. The 1985
attacks occurred at the Rome and Vienna airports. (Return to the
corrected sentence.)
Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair. His latest book,
Blood, Class and Empire: The Enduring Anglo-American Relationship, is
out in paperback.