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Fahrenheit 9/11 MIM is happy to see Fahrenheit 9/11 doing so well in theaters, despite getting less screen time than the schlock released on its opening weekend.(1) We want people to see this movie, and to confront the cynicism and hopelessness of Amerika's "War on Terror." That so many people are rushing to Fahrenheit 9/11 means that after more than two-and-a-half years of war Amerikans are finally willing to take politics more seriously. Unfortunately, much as in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, this new-found attention to politics over escapism has more to do with the mounting Amerikan death toll in Iraq than it does with the internationalist awakening this country needs if it is ever to enter a civilized community of nations. Also unfortunately, Moore panders heavily to this brand of Amerika-first liberalism, turning what could have been a really good expose of the War on Terror into a public service announcement for getting out the vote. But let's start with the good parts. Moore takes a big bite out of the fear Amerikans have been sold. He interviews a Congressman who argues the main function of the Department of Homeland Security's terror alert system is to stun the U.$. populace into compliance because "people will do anything when they're afraid." Of course, the Congressman's apt comments come a little too late: as Moore points out, no one in Congress read the draconian Patriot Act before passing it. So much for relying on beauty- contest winners--er, "our elected representatives"--to take risky, principled stands. "Fahrenheit" aptly ridicules the devices security companies are selling now to give people the illusion of security--a safe room for every home and a parachute, for those times you need to jump from your flaming office building. The upshot of all this fear mongering has been predictable: robust support for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and people who advise their neighbors "don't trust anyone you don't know." We see the extremely unthreatening Fresno Peace Action group being victimized by the kind of policing the new, broader definitions of "terrorism" have sanctioned. Police infiltrated this group of largely middle-aged whites whose main activity is to hold rush-hour street corner vigils against the war. The members learned of the infiltration when the kop who had invaded their group was hurt in a traffic accident and had his photo in the local paper. The War on Terror is a war on dissent. The only reasonable response to this knowledge is to stand up and defend that right while we still can.(2) Moore notes that the bourgeois media have only helped to spread fear and promote the war, acting principally as a wire service for the White House and the Pentagon since 9/11. Dan Rather is shown, with a backdrop of bombs dropping on Baghdad, giving an emotional speech to the effect that "one" cannot help but to hope that one's own country will win the war. In another display of open jingoism we see Katie Couric telling the camera that she, for one, thinks that "Navy SEALS rock." This all serves as a good lesson for people who taunt MIM and other radicals, asking "have you ever been to Iraq?" when we criticize the war. Hundreds of reporters went and couldn't manage to add anything to the Defense Department briefings handed out in Washington but a little local color. Going to Iraq didn't help those journalists analyze the news they were reporting: doing that requires critical thinking and the ability to learn from history. Moore demonstrates, all too briefly, how the U.$. army is terrorizing the Iraqi people. A middle-aged Iraqi womyn screams that god is going to take vengeance on the Amerikans, that Allah will destroy the houses of the Amerikans the way Amerikans have just destroyed her uncle's house. Clearly, the Iraqi people hate Amerika because Amerika is tearing their country apart, inflicting mass civilian casualties, destroying homes, schools and hospitals. While there is still no proof of any connection between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, the U.$. military is doing a good job raising a new generation of Iraqis who would be justified, should they choose to devote their lives to inflicting violence on Amerika. According to Fahrenheit 9/11 anyway, U.$. troops take their jobs about as seriously as they do the video games they play to aid their training for active combat. One tank unit plays a CD of "let the motherfucker burn" while running raids. By the troops' own description, the music helps them get hyped up for bulldozing whatever is in their path. A commander talks about "winning hearts and minds" before we see his troops go out on a nighttime raid that includes pointing machine guns at innocent and terrified wimmin while interrogating them about the men in their house. The soldiers arrest a college-age man without telling him or his family what he has been charged with. Some of the Amerikan troops are disillusioned about their jobs and emphasize that the war is not a video game, that they had no idea of the kind of destruction they would be seeing before their tours began. One soldier's letter home includes fury at George Bush for sending him into Iraq. One Marine back from active duty in Iraq is clear that he will refuse to return to Iraq on penalty of prison. These latter dissenters' stories are compelling, and their presence and willingness to talk is encouraging, but it seems clear even to Moore's hopeful eye that they are the minority. In the end, this reviewer found Fahrenheit 9/11 less compelling than Moore's last, "Bowling for Columbine," even though the subject here is of much deeper concern to MIM. "Bowling for Columbine" had its problems--summed up in Moore's insistence that Amerika is a great country in need of fixing, rather than a rotten society living at the expense of the international proletariat. But because its emphasis was on the contradictions within the white Amerikan nation, it was easier for Moore to build a progressive analysis. He focused on the tremendous violence perpetrated by the U.$. military as the real violence in this society, as opposed to the video game and rock music violence conservatives went all out to censor after the Columbine High School shootings. With "Fahrenheit 9/11" Moore is in over his head dealing with the principal contradiction --that between Amerika and the Third World countries it dominates economically and militarily -- and his analysis never goes deeper than that of the liberal wing of the Democratic Party. As in "Bowling for Columbine," Moore emphasizes that he loves Amerika and believes it is a great country. His emphasis is on fixing what is wrong with this country, which to his mind is embodied by the Bush clique. All Moore wants people to do after seeing the film is get out the vote.(3) The film ends up feeling pretty flabby, because of all the causes one could finger for spawning the 9/11 attacks. Bush's supposedly persynal stranglehold on U.$. foreign policy is so not the point. Moore would have us believe that the reasons terrorists attacked Amerika are all wrapped up in the Bush family's business and persynal connections with the Saudi royal and bin Laden families. He even suggests that since Saudis control 7% of the investment in some Amerikan stock exchange, they run the U.$. government. This is where Moore's Amerika-first bias is most cringe-worthy, and--aside from justifying racial profiling--it keeps him from seeing things as they really are. We don't deny the connections between the Amerikan government and the Saudi ruling clique, but Moore has the relationship bass- ackwards. The United $tates has the most leverage. After all, the unpopular Saudi royal family owes its position to Amerikan support--support that comes with some pretty tight strings attached. Furthermore, all those harping about the Saudi regime being soft on bin Laden would do well to recall that the CIA gave bin Laden the training and start-up funds he later used to pressure the Saudis and others. Moore favorably refers to a $1 trillion lawsuit brought by relatives of 9/11 victims against the Saudi royal family; the Bush administration opposes this lawsuit. As we reported earlier, aside from failing to understand the deeper connections between the CIA and bin Laden, "the demand for $1 trillion is nothing but war-propaganda, as any but the most naive will realize, because there is no way to extract that $1 trillion for such a nonsensical cause except war to take over Saudi assets."(5) If MIM made a movie focusing on Bush the way Moore did, it would be how he, his father, and Rumsfeld aided Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden. Trying to blame Saudis for 911 is sugar-coating what happened for those Amerikans unwilling to stomach that their own political role in selecting their leaders such as Bush is at the root. Amerikans must learn to think about what some of their government leaders gained from 911 and what unnecessary capitalist risks they would be willing to take that guarantee another one. Thus, despite Moore's emotional appeal that young Amerikan men and wimmin not be sent to kill and die for needless causes, Moore's Amerika-first sentiments betray him. He may be playing a different tune than Bush, but he's beating the war drums just the same. Moore also argues that the Bushes' heavy involvement with big oil (and Cheney's with Halliburton) are the roots of the war in Iraq. Of course there is truth here, as we see Bush speaking at a white tie event: "some call you the elite. I call you my base" to appreciative applause. But it is not all, or even the most important part of the truth, which extends to other administrations and the government in general. Fahrenheit 9/11 takes a big hit in saying nothing about the hand the Clinton Administration, say, played in curtailing civil liberties with the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996. Moore also completely ignores the decades- old Amerikan partnership with Israel to humiliate the Palestinian people and disrupt the Middle East. And he neglects to mention the ground Clinton laid for this latest war in Iraq with the so-called Iraq Liberation Act, which authorized the "regime change" that has Democratic voters so riled up. If "regime change begins at home," how about those same Democratic voters take responsibility this next time around for electing a president who won't sanction illegal assassinations halfway around the world? This is to say nothing of the fact that a bourgeois democratic government is by definition the administrative arm of the bourgeoisie--whether its officers are of that class or not. Which brings us to the fact that the Washington Post calculated and Moore repeats, that Bush spent almost half of his first 12 months in office on vacation. In the end, people get the leaders they deserve, and a population that can bring itself to oppose an unjust war only when the number of its own dead approaches 1,000 deserves "Dubya." That said, it's good to see popular debate on the subject of this war Amerika has been fighting under the false pretense of finding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Moore makes big play of the fact that only one Congresspersyn has a child serving in active duty in the military, while Congress has sent the sons and daughters of the lowest rungs of labor aristocracy to fight for less than questionable cause. The solution to these problems is not to be found in replacing leaders within the current zero-accountability system. The solution is to replace this system with one that holds its leaders accountable with their lives if necessary, for wasting the lives of others, as Mao sacrificed his own son in the Korean War. The movie's closing scene, of George Bush blundering the old saying "Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me" gets a big laugh, but Moore misses its point. It's not that the country shouldn't be fooled into re-electing Bush (a point on which Moore is in agreement with close to half the country already anyway), it's that people need to quit being fooled by the falsehood that Amerika-first-ism can prevent terrorism. As MIM wrote on 9/11/2001: "The fact that there are so many possible threats in the world is something that should tell the leaders of the United $tates that problems have reached well- beyond the point where they can be managed by keeping track of various peoples and groups. U.$. leaders have failed miserably with their arrogant superpower attitude that denies the simple fact that in this modern world almost anyone can kill anyone with high-tech weapons.... "The U.$. people must also learn their lesson.... While the last presidential election hinged on Monica Lewinsky and George Bush's supposed amiability as someone 'to drink a beer with,' the U.S. Government kept up a grinding war against peoples all over the world. The U.$. people have treated politics as a joke, the whole time that multi-billion dollar U.$.-sponsored wars are going on all around the world and people starve to death in eight digit figures annually. ... It is precisely the people of the United $tates who as part of the world's superpower must be most relentless in the pursuit of global peace, and not get sidetracked with comfortable and arrogant attitudes."(4)
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