The lies of Michael Moore. By Christopher Hitchens
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.
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. Something—I cannot guess what, since we knew as much
then as we do now—has 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.
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 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-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 Kandahar—an insurance
against warlordism and a condition of nation-building—is nearing
completion with infinite labor and risk. We also discover that the
parties of the Afghan secular left—like the parties of the Iraqi
secular left—are 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 that—as you might expect—Clarke 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 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. 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. Then—wham! 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 this—his pro-American moment—was 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 repelled—Saddam having
killed quite a few Americans and Egyptians and Syrians and Brits in
the meantime and having threatened to kill many more—the 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 reported—and the David Kay
report had established—that 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 warnings—not
exactly an original point—the 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.) So—
he 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. Again—simply 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 draft—the
most statist and oppressive solution? Does he think that only hapless
and gullible proles sign up for the Marines? Does he think—as he
seems to suggest—that 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.
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 planes—we 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
lawyers—get 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.
Article URL: slate.msn.com
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