Posted on 07/17/2004 6:10:08 PM PDT by struwwelpeter
A "New Gazette" correspondent attends the London premier of this year's film sensation "Fahrenheit 9/11"
Certainly this is an anti-Bush film, and in this sense from time to time it is excellently filmed. Everything is extremely clear: Bush is skillfully separated from all his words and self-confident facial expressions and shown to be the greatest eccentric of our times. The London theater at first laughs loudly, then in unison sighs: "my God..." while the appearance of silly Britney Spear's talking head, with words of support for "my president" is encountered by a collective shuddering...
The anti-Bush emotions aren't everything, however. After letting us laugh awhile, the camera presents documents whose content cannot but shock the audience. For example: after the tragedy on September 11th, the running commentary explains, all flights over the US were cancelled, and even Papa Bush was forced to land somewhere. But look: here is the flight clearance of the only aircraft permitted to fly at that time... It turns out that this was the departure from the states to Saudi Arabia by numerous relatives of Ben laden. By order of Bush, whose family has old petroleum connections with that family...
The author's basic theme is clear: to Bush, petrodollars count more than American lives, this means that as president, Bush is America's biggest calamity in a decade. Try to detract from the proofs in the film: in the Summer of 2001, a time just before September 11th, when it would have been be worthwhile for the president to attentively read the intelliegence services' alarming reports, and Bush, annoyed that many were dissatisfied with him, departs on a long vacation to hunt rabbits, play golf and cowboy, and ranch... And doesn't even touch the special reports.
So September 11th comes - and we see how Bush, ever the comedian, swimming through his shock and making patriotic speeches, each more military than the last. And then, bombing in Afghanistan, later - in Iraq. The Islamic world is driven into a corner and snaps... But what could they do? Return to the favor to Bush?
Stop. Englishmen are ardent in their mass anti-Americanism - that's why they laugh so hard in the cinema, seeing picture after picture from Bush's life. But what if you just flew in from Russia?
If you just flew in, it's not very funny. The military-political parallels are already too obvious. From words to deeds. From all these "pissing on them" and "to call up the army" as a means for this pissing - to the thousands of victims caused by the "anti-terror war." One and a half hours with the English, gathered in the film auditorium to laugh at Bush, and you increasingly realize that Moore's film was modelled on us. The deeper that the director immerses himself in Bush's twisting of anti-Islamic hysteria throughout the world, with his so-called the "coalition of the willing", the less our thoughts are strictly about Bush and company, and more about our own (president).
Moore certainly doesn't show us that Bush wanted September 11th to happen... But... it came at just the right time. On the eve of September 11th, Bush wasn't legitimate in the eyes of Americans (he received less than a majority of the votes in the elections, and even that was revealed only in Florida where the governor is Bush's brother). Bush's pride is hurt - and Bush needed something like this urgently, something to prove his strength and support his legitimacy. What would this be? War.
And war came to Bush at just the right time.
But how was it with us (in Russia)? Yeltsin appointed his successor, they showed him off to the nation, and he seemed a shadowy person - lacking charisma, lacking ideas, lacking a an explicit record of service to the people. This "Russian Bush" is also unprecedented, semi-selected, with a flawed legitimacy, strategically weak, with strange advisers who come from who knows where, accidental... Where could we go from here without war?
And war came to Putin. At just the right time.
The demonstration of a patriotic fist to the (Russian) common man makes journalists on (Russian) government-run television channels squeal with enthusiasm - the nation adores the fist. The demonstation of a patriotic fist to the American common man makes journalists on US government-run television channels (as figuratively shown by Moore) squeal with with enthusiasm - and this nation adores the first.
There is a theme on which Moore barely reflects: how exactly did Bush come to power? But question also requires an answer: how did two gentlemen come to occupy the highest post in two superpowers almost simultaneously, and after their arrival to these highest of positions, found it necessary to reassure themselves, and thus drew closer to each other and lashed out at the world?
Everything complex is usually explained simply. The two main reasons are obvious.
First, personal: those suspected of crimes are always drawn to each other in order to support each other and more effectively take vengeance against their enemies. If this were to happen in kindergarten, revenge is limited to sandbox. But if the field for self-assertion is a nation and government, then bombings start, thousands of refugees are displaced, guerrilla warfare begins in reply, blood, ruin, hunger, and the desperation of millions. Director Moore demonstrates that it is important for the avenger to "correctly" select the tool for the realization of his plan - so that as a result the avenger would be accepted as the First and Only.
For Bush this tool was Bin Laden, nurtured by the personal efforts of the Bush family, "one of their own" that is to say. And just as Bin Laden is to Moore, more persistently we recall (Chechnyan terrorist) Basayev. Let's not to forget that Basayev was molded in his present form exactly by two Chechen wars, when Putin held the post of the director of the FSB.
After creating Bin Laden, the Bushes undoubtedly attempted of to get rid of him as compromising evidence. So too Putin. The FSB in those days - at the end of the 1990s - was the service obligated to neutralize Basayev's actions, the same agency which was run by Putin, who diligently created him (Basayev). But in 1999 the time came to get rid of Basayev as compromising evidence, but at the beginning he was used as a tool for unleashing a war.
This is not a paranoid spy story - like those primitive, all too often used plot twists we know from crime stories. History knows of many similar examples during the days of monarchs, emperors, and their servants. Today this primitive twist will have to perish in part due to us. Their number is in the thousands. Among the thousands - are not just loyal soldiers, but women, children, old men. Cruel film pictures of mutual suicide, taken by Fahrenheit's group in Iraq, knock one from their feet not just by themselves, but by the impression of deja vu. This is all to familiar in Chechnya. It's just that it hasn't been going on for as long in Iraq as in Chechnya. And there are more Iraqis. And the territory there as greater.
There's a hint by Moore of the second reason for Bush's proximity to Putin. Both of them are from the "Cold War" generation. They were brought up in this style, the traditional "a bash on the head and keep it in your hat" is nearer and dearer to them than tolerance. Certainly, this is the plague of that generation, which is lost without opposition. They have no culture of creation. And, after a decade of dancing with joy at the fall of the Berlin Wall, it's suddenly boring without an enemy. The most improvised material in this sense was the Islamic world. First - (changing) the face of its individual representatives. Later, the exclusion area began to be enlarged. They began to convert the Islamic world into the strategic enemy of the Christian world. But in reacton to this transformation, and in connection with the methods used in this fight, even those Moslems - who had nothing against non-Moslems and lived in the tradition of tolerance - became the supporters of fight against Bush and Putin.
Already the planet feels a movement in the collective Moslem consciousness, akin to the shifts of the earth's crust in the course of earthquake, and a third world war doesn't seem so far away anymore.
...Almost at the end "Fahrenheit", Bush is just like the Messiah. The arbiter of peace. Remember Putin. He's already sitting on the golden throne, and isn't ashamed, doesn't call anyone to stand by him. Alone at the summit. But chosing a flawed messiah makes is a loss for the world.
It doesn't seem that there will be any problems renting Michael Moore's film in Russian. The parallels are too obvious. The conclusions are too precise.
Anna Politkovskaya, reviewer for "New Gazette", London, July 15th, 2004
Too many errors to even begin a rebuttal, take it as humor or oppostion research.
This b!tch doesn't have a clue whatsoever.
This reads like a book report written by a fourth grader.
Say anything you like Michael Moore has seriously damaged this country with his film. He hasnt hurt GWB that much in the election with it because anyone with an IQ of over 75 knows the truth but this film is playing in countries that dont know the truth and they are accepting it. Michael Moore is worse than Tokyo Rose , or Lord Haw Haw, he is a traitor.
It is Russia that disolved the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, it is Russia that perhaps took heed of President Reagan to some extent with a more open society. It is Russia that took back the Chechens. Stalin abolished their republic in 1945. Krushchev brought them back.
What have they repaid Russia with?.
I hold this to be true. Though a Socialist, Prime Minister Clement Atlee (1945-1951) was one of the greatest British humanitarians that ever lived. (Re the Galician Division). George W. Bush is the finest human being for our times. At other times he may have been the wrong man. He is neither a weak pacifist, an appeaser; nor is he an unfeeling power drunk wielder of the immense power he has. How lucky America is.
I am tempted to cancel this post. In for the evening, I glance at a beverage I have just imbibed- Smirnoff. Ah well..... Cheers.
I'm no film critic, but I agree with these two guys. Give me a "demonstration of the patriotic fist" over the limp wrist of diplomacy any day.
Cheers!
Anna Politkovskaya
It may be my fault.
Ms. Politkovskaya writes uses a lot of hard to translate colloquialisms and pseudo-political jargon. I substituted 'common man' for her 'lumpen proletariat', among other strange terms. It wasn't easy - I kept getting pissed off and deleting everything, only to go back and have another go at her review/psychobabble. Politkovskaya's long, run-on sentences, followed by several Hemmingway-esque clauses incorrectly punctuated as sentences, are evident in other translations of her work, so it's not just me.
The lady in question left Russia three years ago, using the 'political refugee' scam to get a special EU passport, European dominion and an 'untouchable' status while travelling about her former homeland. She writes for Danish and a French journals, as well as the left-wing 'Novaya Gazeta', and generally about Chechnya. 'Time' magazine (European edition) hailed her as one of the "heroes of 2003" for stories on Russian abuse of Chechnyan prisoners (sounds familiar).
Living and working in that anti-American milieu has probably drastically lowered Ms. Politkovskaya's IQ, so perhaps your assessment is correct.
She'd be more at home in a burqha.
You need to be more specific of your words: the Socialist Russian perspective. Unless one can say: Moore's film is the AMERICAN perspective....unbelievably, in Russia many many opionions and parties.
Russian has very long sentences. I get in trouble with my english professor because I use long Russian sentence and he says they are wrong...so rewrite and rewrite.
I'd pay big bucks if you could provide me with ONE pro-American story on a .ru website.
About as often as US, any US media publish anything positive of Russia.
ping
She writes like a typical leftest intelligencia, creating "big" words to show her superiority over the dirty masses. Nothing new, typical elitist. It would appear that in Russia just like in the US, the leftists, communists and socialists see a kindred in Chechins, Palistinians and any other mass murderers. It would also seem the British are brain dead, especially when one considers the legislature they have passed in the past 5 years.
Well at least Russia is successfully ridding herself of the new intelligentsia. Good luck Britain.
I'm in the process of revising my opinion of Ms. Politskovskaya. She's a bit like Christopher Hitchens - you can't hate her all the time.
What is there to revise?
And now: Russian MiGs in Venezuela. Some friend.
That said, Putin's probably the best thing to happen to Russia in ninety years. When Europeans criticize Bush, I let them know in no uncertain terms that Bush's job is to please Americans, not Europeans. When foreigners are pissed at him, I tell them, that means Bush is doing his job right. Then we get down to some serious drinking ;-)
So... I don't expect Putin to sacrifice Russian interests for American ones. Anymore than Bush should subbordinate our interests to Russian ones.
Thanks to Ms. Politkovskaya's aggressive reporting on the Russian military's abuses in Chechnya, I've got a ready-made comeback to Russians wanting to bitch about Abu Graib.
We just gave asylum to a chechen terrorist who is, I am sure, currently buddying up with the leftists in DC and making all kinds of new friends.
And that was not even business. That was just plain old betrayal. So don't tell me about friendship.
I don't want these people in my country. Period.
The State dept stinks of rotting leftist flesh.
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