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Titolo: Michael Moore l'americano amico dei talebani

I sinistri non sono una malattia solo italiana, ahime', ogni nazione ha 
il proprio terrorista allevato in casa.
L'america purtroppo ha l'obeso palla di lardo moore
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.
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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.
Still from Fahrenheit 9/11
Recruiters in Michigan
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.
Still from Fahrenheit 9/11
Trying to talk congressmen into sending their sons to war
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.


Mi spiace per te, ma Michael Moore non e' un terrorista, oltretutto e'
di destra come te. Con la differenza pero' che lui e' onesto e forse
un po' + intelligente, tu no.
ciao

 the United States .


 il proprio terrorista allevato in casa.
Bin laden appunto...


Beh, quello George W. lo ha allevato anche fuori casa. 

 di destra come te.
E' di destra??? Ti prego, non smitizzarmelo.
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E' di destra??? Ti prego, non smitizzarmelo.
E' un democratico. Secondo te i democratici in USA sono di sinistra??
E' una destra + blanda dei repubblicani, ma sempre di destra sono.
Certo molto meglio i democratici, che i reazinoari repubblicani...