1Reviews and everything / Fahrenheit 9_11 Analytical Review

Alex Kvartalny @ flamedragon27.blogspot.com

Group 501

The Day the Earth Stood Still, or Not Even Ricky Martin Could Fly

(Analytical Review of Farenheit 9/11 by Michael Moore and the US War on Terror)

★★★★

Where were you when the world stopped turning that September day?

Out in the yard with your wife and children

Working on some stage in LA?

Did you stand there in shock at the site of

That black smoke rising against that blue sky?

Did you shout out in anger

In fear for your neighbour

Or did you just sit down and cry?

Did you weep for the children

Who lost their dear loved ones

And pray for the ones who don't know?

Did you rejoice for the people who walked from the rubble

And sob for the ones left below?

Did you burst out in pride

For the red white and blue,

The heroes who died just doing what they do?

Did you look up to heaven for some kind of answer

And look at yourself to what really matters?

• Alan Jackson, Where were you?

***

Down at headquarters, there’s a big database

With black and white photos of the side of your beautiful face.

And your library record, and all your test scores

And an invitation to party like it’s 1984.

Baby, don’t look so nervous, they just want the facts.

And it’s all written out in the USA PATRIOT act,

Cause we don’t take no chances in a nation at war,

So tonight we’re gonna party like it’s 1984!

– Anaïs Mitchell, 1984

***

Michael Moore, the director of Bowling for Columbine, was born in Davison, a suburb of Flint, Michigan in 1954. He was elected to the Flint school board at the age of 18 being politically active as a teenager. He briefly attended the University of Michigan but left to pursue social and political causes. Moore started a weekly alternative newspaper in the mid-1970s called the Flint Voice (later the Michigan Voice) and also hosted a radio show. In 1986 Moore was hired to edit the liberal magazine Mother Jones but was fired after a few months over differences with the magazine’s publisher. Moore moved back to Flint, where he became disturbed by massive layoffs in the city’s automobile factories, especially at General Motors Corporation. Although he never worked for the company, many of his relatives did in the past. Angered by the company’s decision to lay off thousands of U.S. employees and move jobs to foreign countries with cheaper labor, Moore decided to make a film about the high unemployment and resulting social problems in Flint. That movie, Roger & Me (1989), chronicled Moore’s many fruitless attempts to confront General Motors executive Roger Smith and persuade him to visit Flint. The film earned numerous awards and became the highest grossing documentary film up to that time.

Michael Moore’s film Fahrenheit 9/11 was shot in 2004 and later won several awards including the Palme d'Or at the 57th Cannes Film Festival. The film holds the record for highest box office receipts by a general release political film. It is the highest grossing documentary of all time as for April 7^th, 2009. The title of the film alludes to Ray Bradbury's 1953 novel Fahrenheit 451, a dystopian view of the future United States, analogizing the autoignition temperature of paper with the date of the September 11 attacks; the film's tagline is "The Temperature at Which Freedom Burns." Moore dedicated the film to his friend who was killed in the World Trade Centre attacks and to those servicemen and women from Flint, Michigan that have been killed in Iraq. The film is also dedicated to "countless thousands" of civilian victims of war as a result of United States military activities in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The movie takes a critical look at the presidency of George W. Bush, in particular at his failure as the leader of the country capable of quick decisions for the benefit of the whole nation, his links to the nation that had bombed the World Trade Centre, the aftermath of September, 11^th 2001 terrorist attacks, the US-led occupation of Iraq and the War on Terrorism and its coverage in the news media.

Here are some statistics that Michael Moore's creation, in a rather biased way, as the director himself points out, provides us with:

• In the months in office before September 11^th, G. W. Bush was on vacation 42% of the time (Critics dispute this figure as misleading, remarking that it includes visits by foreign dignitaries as vacation time);

• when Congress completed its own investigation the Bush White House censored 28 pages of the report;

• in all, 142 Saudis, including 24 members of the bin Laden family were allowed to leave the country;

• 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudis;

• at least 2,985 people died in the September 11, 2001, attacks, including 19 terrorists and 2,966 victims [2,998 as of Spring 2009]

The first point Michael Moore makes in his documentary is the condemnation of George W. Bush's presidency. It is peculiar that the feature-length documentary had been released 4 months before the 2004 presidential elections. The director was able to compile a thought-provoking and revealing collection of video clips that portrays George W. Bush as a initiative-lacking person who is incapable of most primitive things, who worries a lot more about his own interests rather than about the nation he is supposed to represent. One of the many examples in the movie can be cited. The scene is of Bush sitting in a Florida classroom, holding a book for seven minutes after being told there was a second airplane crash into the World Trade Center: “Not knowing what to do, with no one telling him what to do, and with no secret service rushing in to take him to safety, Mr. Bush just sat there, and continued to read "My Pet Goat" with the children. Nearly seven minutes passed with nobody doing anything.”

In addition, Mr. Moore suggests that, perhaps, Mr. Bush is not the best president for the country by revealing the links supposedly worth $1.4 billion existing between his family and the Saudis. Perhaps that is the reason why the Bush administration turned a blind eye to Saudi links to terrorist groups (most of the September 11 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia), the bin Laden Family gaining profit from war production and from the vast oil reserves in the Middle East. The director hints at the fact that Bush's oil business attempts were funded by the bin Laden family. He also investigates the government-sponsored evacuation of Osama's relatives after the attacks when all the planes were not to leave the airports and even Ricky Martin could not fly.

Next comes the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. It was clear to the whole administration that the members of al-Qaeda had been located in Afghanistan but because of the fact that “there were no good targets in Afghanistan” the idea to bomb Iraq was a better one. And because of the huge oil reserves and a gas pipelines as well, as Michael Moore points out. But they had to start with Iraq because “Americans wouldn't stand by

if they'd done nothing on Afghanistan”. There was “solid intelligence” that freedom-hating Saddam Hussein could use weapons of mass destruction to deliver strikes at US cities. And they decided to disarm him with the help of a “coalition” when in fact there was just the United States. So the director is of the view that the 9/11 attacks could be a pretext to the invasion, a kind of opportunity the government had been waiting for. Could it have created it though? Interesting enough, FBI knew that summer there were al Qaeda members in the U.S. And bin Laden was sending his agents to flight schools around the country. But Ashcroft's Justice Department urned a blind eye and a deaf ear. As JK Rowling once said, “for without ever committing an outright act of evil ourselves, we collude with it through our own apathy”.

Indeed, Americans could not stand the fear that was artificially created after the attacks. The government used their most efficient tool to scare the dickens out of ordinary people – media. It made it as clear as day that anyone could be attacked just about anywhere and that nowhere was safe. Naturally, people hearing such biased information on Christmas eve would want something to be done.

Moore also accuses the government that used the situation to their advantage of passing laws that remind us notoriously of George Orwell's 1984 – the Patriot Act adopted by Congress and signed by Bush six weeks after the attacks. It changed the way the government does business. The Patriot Act allows for searches of medical and financial record computer and telephone conversations even for the books you take out of the library. But people Mr. Moore spoke to say they're willing to give up liberties to fight terrorism.

Finally, the message that Michael Moore has been repeating throughout the whole film that because of bad politicians the people who suffer most are the citizens of the country with bad politicians – in this case it is Americans – is ultimately revealed in a most moving way when Michael tells his viewers that even though you might not be participating in a war that takes places hundreds of thousand miles away your friends, sons, brothers and fathers are killed. The directors demonstrates how greedy politicians capitalize on the unemployed and poor “cannon fodder” who trusts them unquestionably. He urges us to stop defending this corrupt system. If we bear in mind George Orwell's quotes from 1984 we'll remember that "It's not a matter of whether the war is not real, or if it is, Victory is not possible. The war is not meant to be won, it is meant to be continuous. Hierarchical society is only possible on the basis of poverty and ignorance. This new version is the past and no different past can ever have existed. In principle the war effort is always planned to keep society on the brink of starvation. The war is waged by the ruling group against its own subjects and its object is not the victory over either Eurasia or East Asia but to keep the very structure of society intact" Perhaps the system would collapse if people simply refused to fight? It worked once for India and it is not unlikely that it will work once again.

However no matter how persuasive Michael Moore can sound, the movie should be taken with a pinch of salt since as the director himself confessed he is biased. Analyst G. Edward Griffin holds the view (Griffin, 2007)⁠ that “the carefully crafted content of the film and the timing of its release make it clear that it was conceived as a covert campaign tool for the Democrat Party and the John Kerry campaign”. The film appeals to our emotions more than to the logic and, according to the article Fifty-nine Deceits in Fahrenheit 911 (Kopel, 2004)⁠ Michel Moore fails to mention so many facts that do not seem to fit into his view of the whole business that it makes one wonder if he is maybe misinterpreting events. For example, its author David Kopel writes, “He [Michael Moore] and others in the film state that 142 Saudis, including 24 members of the bin Laden family, were allowed to leave the country after Sept. 13. The date—Sept. 13—is crucial because that is when a national ban on air traffic, for security purposes, was eased. But nonetheless, many viewers will leave the movie theatre with the impression that the Saudis, thanks to special treatment from the White House, were permitted to fly away when all other planes were still grounded. This false impression is created by Moore’s failure, when mentioning Sept. 13, to emphasize that the ban on flights had been eased by then. The false impression is further pushed when Moore shows the singer Ricky Martin walking around an airport and says, "Not even Ricky Martin would fly. But really, who wanted to fly? No one. Except the bin Ladens."

But the movie fails to mention that the FBI interviewed about 30 of the Saudis before they left. And the independent 9/11 commission has reported that "each of the flights we have studied was investigated by the FBI and dealt with in a professional manner prior to its departure”. There are 58 more of such blunders.

As for my opinion about the movie, I think that its value lies not in the fact that it tarnishes George W. Bush's reputation but in the fact that it makes one think about things, not remain indifferent. It gives food for thought and first and foremost makes people ask questions about themselves they have most likely never asked. It calls for action and reminds us that “we collude with evil through our own apathy”. There is a certain amount of dishonesty on both sides I believe and Michael Moore, just like ex-president Bush, proved the very thing he had been fighting against – power corrupts. Because to be able to tell a story is power, too.

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