Quote:
Originally posted by FlamesAddiction@Oct 18 2004, 06:19 PM
Sure, post it.
And I am talking about using fear on Americans, not the terrorists.
BTW, Iraq has yet to be proven as a legitimate target for battling the terrorists who did the attack 9/11. That war is Bush's fabrication, and he used 9/11 as a way to get in there.
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Used fear on the American people? I believe the terrorists stabbed fear into the heart of the people when they attacked on 9/11. Bush combated that fear.
Here is the article, long but worth the read.
Tom Neven - Fahrenheit 9/11
To call Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 a confused mess would be to dishonor confused messes. It’s basically a lie masquerading as a documentary.
Moore started his “documentary” film career with 1989’s Roger & Me. During that film he perfected his cheap-shot, ambush-interview technique by constantly hounding the then-chairman of General Motors, Roger B. Smith, about why GM closed a car-manufacturing plant in Moore’s hometown of Flint, Mich., thus devastating the region’s economy even while GM allegedly posted record profits.
Ten years and a half-dozen or so films later, Moore created Bowling for Columbine, another supposed piece of nonfiction about gun control and the infamous Denver-area school shootings in 1999. Ignoring the many distortions contained in that film—type “Michael Moore” into Google and you’ll find a whole host of Web sites dedicated to exposing his falsehoods—Hollywood somehow saw fit to award him the 2003 Academy Award for Best Documentary.
That put Moore in a position to now uncover the “truth” about 9/11 and the Bush family ties to Saudi Arabia and the bin Laden family—yes, that bin Laden family. He weaves a self-contradictory web of half-connections, coincidences and sinister music to imply, among other things, that (take a deep breath) the war in Afghanistan was not a retaliatory attack for that country’s harboring of Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda but because the Unocal Oil Company, which just happens to have headquarters in Texas, the same state where George W. Bush was governor, wanted to build a natural gas pipeline from the Caspian Sea to the Persian Gulf, so the U.S. had to first conquer Afghanistan before moving on to Iraq to facilitate this profit-making venture (whew!).
What he doesn’t reveal is that Unocal pulled out of that deal before 9/11 ever happened.
For Slate.com, Christopher Hitchens, a left-leaning journalist, wrote, “To describe [Fahrenheit 9/11] as dishonest and demagogic would almost be to promote those terms to the level of respectability.” He goes so far as to compare Moore to Leni Riefenstahl, who made those gorgeously photographed propaganda films for Adolf Hitler.
Hitchens does a yeoman’s job of disassembling Fahrenheit 9/11, a dissertation on which would be too lengthy for this forum. Sufficient here are a few examples of the cheap tricks Moore employs: He talks about President Bush retiring for the evening on the evening of Sept. 10, 2001, but the image on the screen is one of those Norman Rockwell-ish paintings of a mom tucking her young boy into bed. He also expends a lot of film time showing Bush administration officials preparing for TV interviews, having their faces powdered, their hair combed, and so forth. (Apparently Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz uses his own spit to slick back his hair.)
Moore devotes several more minutes of film to Attorney General John Ashcroft singing a patriotic song. Why? It can’t be because the singing is bad; Ashcroft actually has a nice tenor voice. Maybe it’s because Moore considers him goofy or stupid and assumes we all think the same.
Another trick: In the part of the film leading up to the 2003 Iraq war, Moore shows images of Iraqi children playing, flying kites, etc. Never does he show Saddam’s mass graves, images from his torture videos, and the dead women and children gassed by Saddam’s forces.
He shows a clip of George W. Bush speaking at New York’s Alfred E. Smith Dinner in 2000 where he jokes to the white-tie audience, “I call you the haves and the have-mores. Some call you the elite; I call you my base.” What Moore does not tell you is that then-Vice President Al Gore was a co-guest of honor with Bush at that dinner, and that it’s traditional for politicians to poke fun at themselves at the annual bipartisan charity event sponsored by the Archdiocese of New York. Moore simply presents it as if Bush is buttering up the big-money crowd.
These are all tried-and-true tricks of the trade when it comes to making fictional films. Moore insists he's not creating fiction, but reporting facts. And that makes a huge difference.
Unfortunately for Moore (but providentially for those interested in truth), between his final cut of the film and its release, several things happened that undercut his account. Among them was the 9/11 Commission’s conclusion that nothing sinister was behind the post-9/11 flights that allowed some Saudis and members of the bin Laden clan to leave the United States. In fact, former counterterrorism official Richard Clarke, otherwise held up as a brave hero by Moore, testified that he alone made the decision to allow those flights.
The philosopher Emmanuel Kant said we should never treat human beings as means to an end but only as ends in themselves. Moore isn't listening. Most deeply offensive to me as a veteran is his condescending treatment of the U.S. military. He ostentatiously dedicates the movie to soldiers from Flint who died in the war, but in the film itself treats soldiers and potential recruits as poor idiots who were duped into joining the military only for a leg-up out of the ghetto. The soldiers he interviews in Iraq come across as testosterone-crazed killers.
What should offend everyone is Moore’s letting the camera linger interminably on a mother in deep grief over the loss of her son in Iraq. One quickly senses that he cares less about the mother than the point he wants to make. She and her grief are simply means to his end.
Moore went to great lengths to defend himself before Fahrenheit 9/11 even hit theaters, and has threatened to sue anyone who attacks him or the film. (This from a man who depends on a very generous First Amendment to do what he does for a living.) He asserts every fact in the movie is true. But even if he's right, the overall project can still be a lie.
Harvard professor Sissela Bok dissects lies in all their varieties in the book Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life. In its pages this truth emerges: If I state something that is false but I sincerely believe it to be true, I haven’t lied; I’m merely mistaken. But if I state a number of things that happen to be true but deliberately leave out a single exonerating fact or present information out of context, all with the intent to deceive, I have lied. What then, would Mrs. Bok think of Michael Moore?
Families trying to decide if wading into Moore's political swamp might prove a stimulating intellectual exercise in the art of debunking should be aware that one sequence features American soldiers using the f-word and playing an obscenely titled heavy metal CD. The film also shows many images of war dead and wounded, some of them quite gruesome. (One boy is nude.) A crude joke is made about erections. There's news footage of Americans being burned, beaten and dismembered in the streets of Fallujah, and footage of a public beheading in Saudi Arabia.
For these reasons, Fahrenheit 9/11 is appropriately rated R. Moore appealed the MPAA’s rating, and after being denied, said, “I encourage all teenagers to come see my movie, by any means necessary. If you need me to sneak you in, let me know.” I respectfully suggest otherwise.