Fahreneit 9/11 Redux

[Lord DragonsWing]

He saw some ugly things happening to which little attention was being paid. If that makes him a Democrat, that I'm proud to welcome him to the party.

For what it's worth, Hollywood wanted nothing to do with this film. The distributor who rescued the film after Disney dumped it, is Canadian.

Edited to add: See how tough it is to have all of the facts?

Hollywood wanted nothing to do with this film? I find that hard to believe. They have always been anti-establishment. Hollywood lives in their own world. They know they can put their opinions on film and affect the public. They even had a bureau for that during WWII. Look at the movie with Clark Gable with the Air Force. I took care of a man who served with him. It was all about using film to influence the public.

Moore has done the same thing. He has expressed his own opinion. He's shown Bush staring wide eyed at the camera after 9/11. Who wouldn't? He's added his commentary, and only his to the film.

Does he mention that Putin warned Bush about Saddam? No! Does he mention that Iraq and Al-Quaida were talking? Who knows what about, they were both anti-American. Use your imagination.

I was taught many years ago, to understand your enemy think like them. The enemy is winning because they think differently. They will continue to have Moore and his left wing supporting them even though they don't think they are.

America is not ready to deal with terrorist. We are not willing to fight the war they are. I was taught in the Special Forces if you want to win the battle think and act like your enemy.

Our troops will never be allowed to do that. We'll have Hollywood influencing America from now on. Our soldiers will never be allowed to fight the battle they should fight. Welcome to Vietnam. Welcome to the left winning and talking out of the side of their mouth about supporting our troops while they support this film.

Sorry for the ranting, but this is one old soldiers view. Other than seasparks, this seems like a left wing posting site.

 

[doormouse]

doormouse gets comfy. Orders a large pizza 'hold the onion'.

Damn, who took my remote? I wanna fast forward to the good bits ;-)

 

[Lord DragonsWing]

This is going to be a fun discussion. I've always enjoyed political discussions.

 

[dr_mabeuse]

Does he mention that Iraq and Al-Quaida were talking? Who knows what about, they were both anti-American. Use your imagination.

What in the world does that mean? Hell, Saddam and Rumsfeld "were talking". Bush senior and the Bin Laden family "were talking". SO what?

"Use your imagination" to start a war?

There's something a bit wrong with that way of thinking.

---dr.M.

 

[shereads]

Hollywood wanted nothing to do with this film? I find that hard to believe. They have always been anti-establishment.

That's quaint, but inaccurate. The creative people, like journalists at the reporter-level, might be anti-establishment, but the corporations that write the checks are as establishment as you can get. Again, you're expressing something that you believe without backiing it with facts. i repeat: Disney dumped the film, claiming that it seeks to be politically non-controversial, despite being part of the same corporation that broadcasts Rush Limbaugh.

Moore has done the same thing. He has expressed his own opinion.

Until you've seen the film, you're going to say some things that will later embarrass you because they are irrelevant to the discussion. Every documentary film ever made, with the hope that people would volunteer to watch it, has had a point of view. In this case, it is a point that runs counter to what your government, using your tax dollars, told you to believe. If that upsets you, at least you weren't forced to pay for it.

I, on the other hand, who believed all along that Bush was lying, had to subsidize his press secretary's salary and help pay for the investigation he assigned to Joseph Wilson ~ who was then punished for failing to find out what Bush wanted to hear. I also had to help pay Chalabi's $340,000 a month salary as an informant, which continued up until his office was disbanded last month on evidence that he was spying on us for Iran. We KEPT PAYING the informant who told Rumsfeld that he knew where the WMD were stored, for months after it was found to be bogus information.

Who has a right to be offended? The taxpayers who paid to be lied to? Or you on the right, who are ticked off because somebody has shown the president to be what he is.

He's shown Bush staring wide eyed at the camera after 9/11. Who wouldn't?

The Commander in Chief of the world's last remaining superpower, that's who, during critical minutes when he was the only man who could authorize a shoot-down of the two missing civilian aircraft, one of which would later hit the Pentagon. There was plenty of action in the White House duriing that same amount of time. But the man in charge appeared to be waiting for someone to tell him what to do. Isn't it supposed to be the other way around?

As we now know from Condi Rice's sworn testimony, Bush had seen a report titled, "Osama Bin Laden Plans Attacks In U.S." He also knew of Richard Clarke's fears that it would be done with commercial airliners. With that in mind, it's impossible not to see that footage in the context of this film or any other context, and not wonder if he's thinking, "It really happened. People will say I should have stopped it." That's my commentary, not Moore's.

Since the White House was waiting for his decision on a shoot-down order for the missing planes, it's clear to me why that scene was important to this film. The White House information office must have thought the blank 7-minute stare was a pathetic response too, because until they knew the tape existed, they maintained that the president immediately excused himself from the photo op and got on the phone with the White House.

What an awful thing Moore has done in showing us the truth. And with commentary, no less! That's so Stalinesque.

Does he mention that Putin warned Bush about Saddam?

No, and oddly, neither did George W. Bush. In fact, he initially denied it when Putin said it publically. Odd, isn't it.

Does he mention that Iraq and Al-Quaida were talking?

They weren't. Everybody except you and Cheney and a couple of right-wing media celebs have admitted that by now. Richard Clarke resigned in frustration, because every time he'd submit a report that didn't connect Al Queda and Saddam, the president would have it put back on his desk with a note, "Update and RESUBMIT."

Talk about selective use of facts.

The enemy is winning because they think differently.

The enemy, until Bush invaded Iraq, was Osama bin Laden and a couterie of people organized by him and funded with his help, in large part by the Saudis, as "protection" money to prevent attacks inside their own borders.

The enemy won when Bush did exactly what they wanted him to do. In one night of bombing during the first stages of the Iraq invasion, Bush accomplished what Osama could not have done in a lifetime of planning suicide attacks: he turned Iraq a vast terrorist recruiting ground. Saddam had denied requests to provide sanctuary to Al Queda. He was evil, but he was no idiot. He was considered an enemy of fundamentalist Islam.

Bush ignored the best advice of the only people in his adminstration who have the kind of experience you say you have: Colin Powell, for one, who all but begged Bush not to play into Osama's hands; and Clarke and Tenet, who were punished for their efforts to keep the president focused on Osama and Afganistan.

Which enemy are you thinking like? The ones who didn't want us to invade Iraq? The ones who attacked the most powerful country in the world, thinking we'd surrender or convert to Islam? Please. The only way to surprise this enemy would have been by behaving less predictably than Bush/Cheney. With Cheney already having published his agenda for Iraq in the Project for the New American Century, he provided Osama bin Laden with a blueprint for what we'd do as soon as there was an excuse.

America is not ready to deal with terrorist. We are not willing to fight the war they are.

We did not attack terrorists. On the word of a convicted con man who had his own agenda, we attacked one of the few countries in the Middle East where Islamic fundamentalists couldn't plot openly against the U.S. or anyone else. By the way, not only did the WMD info come from your boy Chalabi; the alleged meeting in Germany between one of the 9/11 hijackers and a member of Saddam's government has been traced to a man who was on Chalabi's payroll (our payroll, if you want accuracy.)It occurred on a date when Atta, the hijacker, was actually in Florida.

You're defending a president who risked American lives on the word of a sleazeball who wanted a piece of the post-Saddam pie in Iraq; a president who refused to listen to the people who had THIS country's interests at heart.

A president who "supports the troops" by reducing funding for VA hospitals and eliminating budget increases to improve benefits for military families. A president who allowed a civilian Defense Secretary to tell the military on the front that they did NOT need more troops when they said they did ~ at a time when we still might have befriended the iraq people by stopping the looting and preventing some of the hell they went through. A president who has allowed Halliburton and other no-bid contracters to drag out a rebuilding effort that took Saddam himself a few months after the first Gulf War, further alienating the Iraqi people and robbing soldiers and taxpayers in the process.

If researching the truth is a leftist tactic, I guess it's a leftist thread, as you say. I keep hearing that Kerry is anti-military, because he wanted a military budget that did more for veterans and soldiers and less to enrich Bechtel and Halliburton. If that's the logic of the right wing, I guess we're doomed to another four years of Bush/Cheney's lies.

 

[Lucifer_Carroll]

Oh look more f***ing politics

Yay! Look, everybody we're all part of the left-wing conspiracy. We're against fighting any wars. We sure as hell don't want to capture terrorists. How else would we be able to push forth our strong-armed leftist agenda? Terrorist attacks have single handedly allowed us to legalize marijuana, strengthen environmental protections, bring about socialized medicine, and force every tenth man and woman to adopt a lesbian or gay lifestyle. One more bombing on American soil and we can roll out the government ordained dashikis. Huzzah!

Listen for the last god damn time. All you conservative centrists and those few of you who are genuinely rightist:

Liberal does not equal Leftist

Are there genuine leftists in America? Yes. Many live in San Francisco and college towns. Are there genuine communists? Not really, but in some of the Humanities departments at some schools there are middle-class white kids who like to pretend they are. Are the Literotica forums a bit more LIBERAL than most places. No shit, it's a porn writer's forum. Most porn writers are liberals. It's a fact of life. I know many people come from towns that are predominately liberal or conservative, but everyone doesn't really follow the same damn ideologies everywhere. You go to a gun owner's forum, you'll see more conservatives than liberals, you go to a porn forum, you'll see more liberals than conservatives. Go to an art college you'll see more liberals than conservatives, go to a corporate board you'll see more conservatives than liberals. It's what fucking happens. Complaining about a leftist agenda to invade your precious porn site is like complaining that rainstorms are invading your precious Wales cottage.

And as far as human stupidity goes. How emotions and idol worships sway. How facts are treated with disdain. How people will be willing to swallow any lies as long as it plays to their feeble intellects and prejudices. All of it can go to Hell and stay there. It doesn't matter any more if Kerry or Bush win. IT NO LONGER FUCKING MATTERS!

Listen, we'll all swallow out-right lies and thank people for it. We're all so fucking caught up in goddamned rhetoric and visions of the other side as blood-sucking demons that anyone can get away with anything. Valerie Plame is probably dead, outed by a pair of political jackasses who felt that they wouldn't get rooted out for treason and they were right, whoever they were. And everyone is wasting their damn times arguing about a fucking movie which probably did less overall damage to America than "Rules of Engagement". Hell, all it pulled off was preaching to the choir. No republicans were swayed to even watch it and centrists were put off by its attack style. A couple of corporations tried to subvert the democratic system with no-check electronic voting and does that get any headlines? Hell no.

Fuck Americans deserve the next hundred-years. We've just fucking proved with Reagan, Clinton, Bush that the Nixon days are over and the O.J. days have begun. Welcome to lies without fears. Now don't wonder about the handbaskets, the slippery ice here at the bottom, or the gate with the "Abandon all hope" sign and grab a fucking hot toddy with me. God damn, I'm starting to loathe politics. Loathe with all the passion I had hoped not to waste on another goddamned wrath. Oh fucking well.

-Welcome to vitriol (aint it bitter?)

 

[Lucifer_Carroll]

I was taught many years ago, to understand your enemy think like them. The enemy is winning because they think differently. They will continue to have Moore and his left wing supporting them even though they don't think they are.

America is not ready to deal with terrorist. We are not willing to fight the war they are. I was taught in the Special Forces if you want to win the battle think and act like your enemy.

Non-political response to the tactics question.

The terrorists are a mobile organization with no defined base of operations and capable of continuing hostilities without a leader. I remember back in the 90s remarking to friends how easily one could infuriate and hold off better-armed traditional armies by lacking a defined headquarters. Worse yet there are multiple forms of terrorists who each have different agendas. The ones known as Al-Queda are an extremist Islam faction with serious problems about Israel and American occupation of Muslim lands. A conventional military strike against them is nigh impossible and there're in fact very few ways to really get at them as direct confrontation tends to breed more. An infiltrate and dismantle style would probably have the most preventative and devastating affect on their organization structure, but America lacks enough Muslim-speaking and Muslim-looking soldiers and spies. Still an agressive unending campaign against the top planners of the attack that doesn't stop until vengeance is wreaked could have a decent effect on future leaders and force them to stick to downplayed attacks against American outposts, embassies, and military ships.

As far as Iraq insurgents go. It's called guerilla warfare. You remember it. They're doing it yet again with similar success. Until we spend more money on anti-guerilla tactics, training, and weapontry and armor instead of on nuclear weapons and giant bombs, we'll always have these problems. Furthermore, invasions meet with heavy resistance by civilians. It's a fact of life. People not willing to join an army become suddenly militaristic when a tank is rolling up the block towards the shattered remains of their house. It's sort of a fact of warfare. There could be more measures to try and sway emotions away from anti-Americanism (repect for religion and culture, showing no signs of Americanizing the public, not torturing people), however things happen in warfare and the important thing is to focus on avoiding the guerilla style tactics and also hopefully of somehow luring the insurgents out of cover-laden buildings into the open desert. This is an unlikely so it now is guerilla versus anti-guerilla and hoping for the best.

I wouldn't reccomend acting like the enemy. Bad things can happen that way. Militaristically, the outrages fuel enemy passion against soldiers and prompts more dreadful actions on the soldiers and civilians. Take for instance the torture of Iraqi citizens and its prompting of them to execute and torture American officers and civilians. That's why we have the Geneva Convention. I know it gets tricky when your enemy is civilian based rather than government based (Iraqi insurgents and Al-queda) because they are not bound by the same laws, but there is a trend towards escalating atrocities that we don't want to begin.

Oh, and minor point, we do think like them. We think exactly like them. Iraqi citizens are the same as Al-Queda, torture victims probably had it coming to them, collatoral damage, enemy combatants, and our generals proclaiming it a Holy War against Evil and Satan. We are them and they are us.

-Me

P.S. Don't respond with some diatribe about my lack of patriotism, my disdain for Christianity, how much I hate America and my mother, my communistic ties, or claptrap about how haha...aren't you leftists easy to make angry and other partisan shit. None of it is meant politically and I'm sick and tired of seeing the same arguments repeated to infinity while comprehension and logic take a long fucking vacation to Hell to drink some of my wonderful Pineapple Punch (it's really quite good, you know). <takes a sip> Mmmm, pineapple punch.

 

[psychocatblah]

I've seen the movie and I've actually seen others of Moore's documentaries. I think that what I came out of the movie wondering about was whether W was actually all that devious or if he's really just incredibly guillible. I think I lean towards the second of that.

The 7 minutes of sitting there with the blank look? I don't know what he was thinking. Maybe it was as Moore said. Or maybe he really was waiting for someone to tell him what to do. Maybe he was thinking he didn't want to scare the children in the room. I can't claim that I did much at first when I saw the planes crashing into the towers. Even Dan Rather was pretty dumbstruck when the second plane hit, and he's paid to commentate.

On that level, it would seem like a personal attack, although I think mostly Moore was just using it as a device to ponder the options that the movie was going to present.

But for me? Well, he was preaching to the choir. I'm skeptical about a few things, not the facts, because the facts are there as they are, there's no changing that.

And yes, I am liberal. He was preaching to the choir. I voted Green in 2000. But I didn't like Bush when he was Governer here either, so there you go.

 

[shereads]

I've seen the movie

Thank God. Now we're talking.

I think that what I came out of the movie wondering about was whether W was actually all that devious or if he's really just incredibly guillible.

I can see both sides of the evil-versus-stupid issue. It's a tough call. Which is better?

The 7 minutes of sitting there with the blank look? I don't know what he was thinking. Maybe it was as Moore said. Or maybe he really was waiting for someone to tell him what to do. Maybe he was thinking he didn't want to scare the children in the room. I can't claim that I did much at first when I saw the planes crashing into the towers. Even Dan Rather was pretty dumbstruck when the second plane hit, and he's paid to commentate.

Ahem. (1) You and Dan Rather hadn't been receiving intelligence briefings that warned of an attack by terrorists using hijacked planes. No wonder you and Dan Rather were caught off-guard.(2) You and Dan Rather hadn't volunteered to be America's go-to man in a crisis.

Given that Richard Clarke had all but spray-painted the White House with the words, "Osama. Planes. Kaboom," total surprise is not even on the tick-list of choices for what might have been on Dubya's mind when the 2nd plane hit.

"I'm screwed," merits consideration, right behind, "I'd better sit perfectly still until the end of 'My Pet Goat,' or these children will be traumatized," and "I hope Dick knows what to do." Last on the list, though I hestitate to include it, is, "I wonder what happens to the goat."

 

[Pure]

Speaking of effective movies, anyone remember "Casualties of War" (1989) with Michael Fox, and Sean Penn (a consummate actor of bad guy roles).

Saw it the other night, and while it was not a supergreat movie, it was blood curdling. In part because there was no simple moment of bloodlust/frenzy, as is the stereotype of such events. Moreso was it affecting, because, it's said "based on a true story."

There are several great lines, one from a soldier allied with Penn: "We are Genghiz Khan." He is exulting in being able to *anything they please. (This is the gist of various White House memos about the powers of the Commander in Chief.)

I note it did not appear till about 15 years after the war in question. Rape is a wonderful metaphor for this type of war.

 

[Pure]

The Wingy Dragon said,

LDW: I was taught many years ago, to understand your enemy think like them. The enemy is winning because they think differently. They will continue to have Moore and his left wing supporting them even though they don't think they are.

America is not ready to deal with terrorist. We are not willing to fight the war they are. I was taught in the Special Forces if you want to win the battle think and act like your enemy.

Our troops will never be allowed to do that. We'll have Hollywood influencing America from now on. Our soldiers will never be allowed to fight the battle they should fight. Welcome to Vietnam. Welcome to the left winning and talking out of the side of their mouth about supporting our troops while they support this film.

Sorry for the ranting, but this is one old soldiers view. Other than seasparks, this seems like a left wing posting site.
-------------

Your analysis hasn't progressed much beyond the movie "Green Berets," and you seem pretty identified with John Wayne.

The idea, 'we could have won if allowed to fight' is particularly discredited, since the French tried it in Algeria, and (ta da) it failed spectacularly.

Further news: This is not a particularly 'left wing' site, as Lucifer noted. It has some articulate liberals (defined as mildly left). By your Reaganeque non-thought, anyone who wants state support for paraplegic single moms is right out there with Lenin. Lucifer_Carroll on the 'left', is scarcely typical. There is, here, a paucity of leftists and anarchists.

Just for the record, and for those who define liberal in terms of Harper's and Village Voice, here's a little LEFT analysis I rather liked:

http://www.newleftreview.net/NLR26101.shtml

New Left Review 27, May-June 2004

The current global conjuncture as a collision between brute imperial interests and blunders in hegemonic control of the image-world. State power and spectacular warfare after September 11, in the view of the Bay Area’s Situationist collective.


RETORT [is a collective, which authored the piece]**

AFFLICTED POWERS:

The State, the Spectacle and September 11


He too fought under television for our place in the sun.
Robert Lowell on Lieutenant Calley, 1971

[start article]
We begin from the moment in February 2003 when the tapestry copy of Picasso’s Guernica hung in the anteroom to the un Security Council Chamber was curtained over, at American insistence—not ‘an appropriate backdrop’, it was explained, for official statements to the world media on the forthcoming invasion of Iraq. [1] The episode became an emblem. Many a placard on Piccadilly or Market Street rang sardonic changes on Bush and the snorting bull. An emblem, yes—but, with the benefit of hindsight, emblematic of what? Of the state’s relentless will to control the minutiae of appearance, as part of—essential to—its drive to war? Well, certainly.

But in this case, did it get its way? Did not the boorishness of the effort at censorship prove counterproductive, eliciting the very haunting—by an imagery still capable of putting a face on the brutal abstraction of ‘shock and awe’—that the velcro covering was meant to put a stop to? And did not the whole incident speak above all to the state’s anxiety as it tried to micro-manage the means of symbolic production—as if it feared that every last detail of the derealized decor it had built for its citizens had the potential, at a time of crisis, to turn utterly against it?

These are the ambiguities, generalized to the whole conduct of war and politics over the past three years, that this essay will explore. We start from the premise that certain concepts and descriptions put forward forty years ago by Guy Debord and the Situationist International, as part of their effort to comprehend the new forms of state control and social disintegration, still possess explanatory power—more so than ever, we suspect, in the poisonous epoch we are living through. In particular, the twinned notions of ‘the colonization of everyday life’ and ‘the society of the spectacle’—we think each concept needs the other if it is to do its proper work—strike us as having purchase on key aspects of what has happened since September 11, 2001.

Our purpose, in a word, is to turn two central Situationist hypotheses back to the task for which they were always primarily intended—to make them instruments of political analysis again, directed to an understanding of the powers and vulnerabilities of the capitalist state. (We take it we are not alone in shuddering at the way ‘spectacle’ has taken its place in approved postmodern discourse over the past 15 years, as a vaguely millenarian accompaniment to ‘new media studies’ or to wishful thinking about freedom in cyberspace, with never a whisper that its original objects were the Watts Riots and the Proletarian Cultural Revolution.)

None of this means that we think we comprehend the whole shape and dynamic of the new state of affairs, or can offer a theory of its deepest determinations. We are not sectaries of the spectacle; no one concept, or cluster of concepts, seems to us to get the measure of the horror of the past three years. We even find it understandable, if in the end a mistake, that some on the Left have seen the recent wars in the desert and squabbles in the Security Council as open to analysis in classical Marxist terms, proudly unreconstructed—bringing on stage again the predictions and revulsions of Lenin’s and Hobson’s studies of imperialism—rather than in those of a new politics of ‘internal’, technologized social control.

The present dark circumstances call for fresh political thought. No attempt at such thinking can avoid three obvious, interlinked questions:


To what extent did the events of September 11, 2001—the precision bombing of New York and Washington by organized enemies of the us Empire—usher in a new era? Did those events change anything fundamental in the calculus and conduct of advanced capitalist states, or in the relation of such states to their civil societies? If so, how?


Are we to understand the forms of assertion of American power since September 11—the naïve demonstration of military supremacy (largely to reassure the demonstrators that ‘something could still be done’ with the monstrous armoury at the state’s beck and call), the blundering attempts at recolonization under way in Afghanistan and Iraq, the threats and payoffs to client states in every corner of the globe, the glowering attack on civil liberties within the us itself—as a step backwards, a historical regression, in which the molecular, integral, invisible means of control which so many of us believed were indispensable to a truly ‘modern’ state-system have given way to a new/old era of gunboats and book-burning?


Do the concepts ‘society of the spectacle’ and ‘colonization of everyday life’ help us to grasp the logic of the present age? Or has the level of social dispersal and mendaciousness to which those concepts once pointed also been overtaken—displaced, abruptly, at a special moment of urgency and arrogance—by cruder, older imperatives of statecraft?

None of these questions, to repeat, can be answered in isolation. No one level of analysis—‘economic’ or ‘political’, global or local, focusing on the means of either material or symbolic production—will do justice to the current strange mixture of chaos and grand design. But one major aspect of the story—the struggle for mastery in the realm of the image—has so far barely been thought of as positively interacting with others more familiar and ‘material’. It is the first outline of this interaction that we aim to offer, for further debate.

II

The version of ‘spectacle’ with which we operate is minimal, pragmatic, matter of fact. No doubt the idea’s original author often gave it an exultant, world-historical force. But his tone is inimitable, as all efforts to duplicate it have proved; and in any case we are convinced that the age demands a different cadence—something closer (if we are lucky) to that of the lines from Paradise Lost we use as our pamphlet’s epigraph [2] than to anything from Lukács or Ducasse.

The notion ‘spectacle’ was intended, then, as a first stab at characterizing a new form of, or stage in, the accumulation of capital. What it named preeminently was the submission of more and more facets of human sociability—areas of everyday life, forms of recreation, patterns of speech, idioms of local solidarity, kinds of ethical or aesthetic insubordination, the endless capacities of human beings to evade or refuse the orders brought down to them from on high—to the deadly solicitations (the lifeless bright sameness) of the market.

Those who developed the analysis in the first place resisted the idea that this colonization of everyday life was dependent on any one set of technologies, but notoriously they were interested in the means modern societies have at their disposal to systematize and disseminate appearances, and to subject the texture of day-to-day living to a constant barrage of images, instructions, slogans, logos, false promises, virtual realities, miniature happiness-motifs. Batteries Not Included, as the old punk band had it.

The choice of the word ‘colonization’ to describe the process was deliberate. It invited readers to conceive of the invasion and sterilizing of so many unoccupied areas of human species-being—areas that previous regimes, however overweaning, had chosen (or been obliged) to leave alone—as a specific necessity of capitalist production, just as much part of its dynamism as expansion to the ends of the earth.

The colonization of everyday life, we might put it from our present vantage point, was ‘globalization’ turned inward—mapping and enclosing the hinterland of the social, and carving out from the detail of human inventiveness an ever more ramified and standardized market of exchangeable subjectivities. Naturally the one colonization implied the other: there would have been no Black Atlantic of sugars, alcohols and opiates without the drive to shape subjectivity into a pattern of small (saleable) addictions.

The point of the analysis, again, was to bring into focus the terms and possibilities of resistance (wars of liberation) against the colonizing forces; this in a situation, the later 1960s, where it was not foolhardy, even if ultimately mistaken, to imagine ‘reassembling our afflicted Powers’ and doing real harm to the enemy.

Debord, to speak of him directly, was concerned most of all with the way the subjection of social life to the rule of appearances had led, in turn, to a distinct form of politics—of state formation and surveillance. His opinion on these matters fluctuated: they were the aspect of the present he most loathed, and which regularly elicited his best tirades and worst paranoia. We extract the following propositions from his pages.

First, that slowly but surely the state in the twentieth century had been dragged into full collaboration in the micro-management of everyday life. The market’s necessity became the state’s obsession. (Slowly, and in a sense against the state’s better judgement, because always there existed a tension between the modern state’s armoured other-directedness—its raison d’être as a war machine—and capital’s insistence that the state come to its aid in the great work of internal policing and packaging. This tension has again been visible over the past three years. We believe it is one key to the obvious incoherence of the state’s recent actions.)

Second, this deeper and deeper involvement of the state in the day-to-day instrumentation of consumer obedience meant that increasingly it came to live or die by its investment in, and control of, the field of images—the alternative world conjured up by the new battery of ‘perpetual emotion machines’ [3] of which tv was the dim pioneer and which now beckons the citizen every waking minute. This world of images had long been a structural necessity of a capitalism oriented toward the overproduction of commodities, and therefore the constant manufacture of desire for them; but by the late twentieth century it had given rise to a specific polity.

The modern state, we would argue, has come to need weak citizenship. It depends more and more on maintaining an impoverished and hygienized public realm, in which only the ghosts of an older, more idiosyncratic civil society live on. It has adjusted profoundly to its economic master’s requirement for a thinned, unobstructed social texture, made up of loosely attached consumer subjects, each locked in its plastic work-station and nuclearized family of four.

Weak citizenship, but for that very reason the object of the state’s constant, anxious attention—an unstoppable barrage of idiot fashions and panics and image-motifs, all aimed at sewing the citizen back (unobtrusively, ‘individually’) into a deadly simulacrum of community.

At times, the first writers to confront this nightmare seemed to despair in the face of it:

There is no place left where people can discuss the realities which concern them, because they can never lastingly free themselves from the crushing presence of media discourse and of the various forces organized to relay it . . . Unanswerable lies have succeeded in eliminating public opinion, which first lost the ability to make itself heard and then very quickly dissolved altogether . . . Once one controls the mechanism which operates the only form of social verification to be fully and universally recognized, one can say what one likes . . . Spectacular power can similarly deny whatever it wishes to, once, or three times over, and change the subject: knowing full well there is no danger of riposte, in its own space or any other. [4]

Too many times over the past twelve months these sentences, in their anger and sorrow at the present form of politics, have echoed in our minds. But ultimately we dissent from their totalizing closure. Living after September 11, we are no longer so sure—and do not believe that spectacular power is sure—that ‘there is no danger of riposte, in its own space or any other’. For better or worse, the precision bombings were such a riposte. And their effect on the spectacular state has been profound: the state’s reply to them, we are certain, has exceeded in its crassness and futility the martyr-pilots’ wildest dreams.

Therefore we turn to another sentence from the same book, which (characteristically) acts as finale to the previous admissions of defeat. ‘To this list of the triumphs of power we should add, however, one result which has proved negative: once the running of the state involves a permanent and massive shortage of historical knowledge, that state can no longer be led strategically.’ [5] Issued by a devotee of Sun Tzu and Clausewitz, this last verdict is crushing.

Debord had a robust and straightforward view of the necessity, for individuals and collectives, of learning from the past (not the least of the ways in which his thinking is classical, as opposed to postmodern). Of course he knew that the past is a ‘construction’; but of obdurate and three-dimensional materials, he believed, constantly resisting any one frame, and which only the most elaborate machinery of forgetting could make fully tractable to power.

His deepest fears as a revolutionary derived from the sense, which grew upon him, that this elaborate machinery might now have been built, and really be turning the world into an eternal present. That was the key to his hatred of the image-life: that what it threatened, ultimately, was the very existence of the complex, created, two-way temporality that for him constituted the essence of the human.

Such was the nightmare. But even Debord sometimes took (cold) comfort from the recognition that the state too lived the nightmare, and would suffer the consequences. For it too could no longer learn from the past: it had progressively dismantled the contexts in which truly strategic discussion of its aims and interests—thinking in the long term, admitting the paradoxes and uncertainties of power, recognizing, in a word, ‘the cunning of reason’—might still be possible.

The state was entrapped in its own apparatus of clichés. It had come almost to believe in the policy-motifs its think-tanks and disinformation consultancies churned out for it. How Debord would have revelled, over the past year, in the endless double entendres provided by the media, to the effect that Bush and Blair’s rush to war in Iraq should be blamed on ‘faulty intelligence’!

III

What, then, politically and strategically, took place on September 11, 2001? And how, politically and strategically, has the us state responded to it? Of course, we realize the dangers here. Why should we follow the lead of the spectacle itself in electing this one among many atrocities—raised to the new power of ideology, inevitably, by the idiot device of digitalizing its dateline—as a world-historical turning point? How much of the real dynamic (and pathology) of American power is conjured away by pinning it thus to a single image-event—in much the same way that American victory in the Cold War was rendered in retrospect magical, unanalysable, by the mantra ‘The Fall of the Wall’?

There have been moments when we found it easy to sympathize with those of our comrades who, partly in reaction to the flood of cloying, pseudo-apocalyptic verbiage released by September 11 (which shows no sign of abating), go so far as to dismiss the bombings as so many pinpricks, attentats, hopeless symbolic gestures on the part of those with no real power to wound.

‘Hopeless symbolic gestures.’ We agree quite strictly with all three words of the diagnosis. (As do the perpetrators, it seems. In them chiliasm is spliced with nihilism, to form a distinctively hyper-modern compound. When they boast in their communiqués of being ‘for Death’—in contradistinction, they imply, to modernity’s miserable attachment to a Life not worth the name—one is never sure if one is hearing Tyndale’s cry from the stake or Stavrogin’s in the last pages of The Possessed.

As so often lately, the twenty-first century seems an amalgam of the sixteenth and nineteenth.) And the question remains: what is the effectiveness—the specific political force—of this form of symbolic action, hopeless or not, within the symbolic economy called ‘spectacle’? Spectacularly, the American state suffered a defeat on September 11. And spectacularly, for this state, does not mean superficially or epiphenomenally. The state was wounded in September in its heart of hearts, and we see it still, three years later, flailing blindly in the face of an image it cannot exorcize, and trying desperately to convert the defeat back into terms it can respond to.

One last caveat. It should hardly be necessary to state that, if we refuse to extract the September bombings from the cycle of horrors over which the us has presided since 1945, and believe it necessary, if we are to understand them politically, to treat the events of September as an occurrence in a war of images, it is not because we fail to recognize (and wish we could find words for) the obscenity of those events. On the contrary, precisely because the attacks in September were calibrated to leave an indelible image-trail behind them, they have seared in the memory item after item of evidence of just what it is, in terms of human fear and agony, that political calculus so habitually writes off.

We too are haunted by the flailing arms of the jumpers, and the scream on the soundtrack as the tower stutters into dust; just as we are haunted by the image of Hanadi Jaradat’s bloody head, ‘her thick hair tied in a ponytail’, dumped by the clean-up squad on a table at the back of the restaurant in Haifa she had blown to pieces an hour before. [6] We wish we had words for these things. We wish we lived in a political culture where the language of revulsion had not been debauched by decade after decade of selective gravitas. (Your Chechnya for my Guatemala. Your Suharto for my Pol Pot.)

We proceed then, unwillingly, from the image on the screen. It matters profoundly that the horrors of September 11 were designed above all to be visible, and that this visibility marked the bombings off from most previous campaigns of air terror, especially those sponsored by states. There were no cameras at Dresden, Hamburg, Hiroshima. [7] The horror there had to be unseen; it had to act—was meant to act—on the surrounding population in the form of uncontrollable hearsay and panic; and it was to be presented to the enemy state apparatus in the form of report, statistic, prediction, ultimatum.

September’s terror was different. It made no demands, it offered no explanations. It was premised on the belief (learned from the culture it tried to annihilate) that a picture is worth a thousand words—that a picture, in the present condition of politics, is itself, if sufficiently well-executed, a specific and effective piece of statecraft. Of course the martyr-pilots knew that bringing down the Twin Towers would do nothing, or next to nothing, to stop the actual circuits of capital. But circuits of capital are bound up, in the longer term, with circuits of sociability—patterns of belief and desire, levels of confidence, degrees of identification with the good life of the commodity. And these, said the terrorists, thinking strategically, are aspects of the social imaginary still (always, interminably) being put together by the perpetual emotion machines.

Supposing those machines could be captured for a moment, and on them appeared the perfect image of capitalism’s negation. Would that not be enough? Enough truly to destabilize the state and society, and produce a sequence of vauntings and paranoias whose long-term political consequences for the capitalist world order would, at the very least, be unpredictable?

Or perhaps entirely predictable, from a geopolitical standpoint. ‘You know our demands’, said the martyr-pilots (strictly to themselves). ‘And we know you cannot accede to them. We know what you will do instead. We are certain your answer will be military. We anticipate your idiot leader blurting out the word crusade. What you will do will vindicate our analysis point by point, humiliation by humiliation, and confirm the world of Islamism in its despairing strength. And you will do it because there is no answer to our image-victory, yet you (because humiliation is something in which you have no schooling) have to pretend there is one.’

The terrorists (to put it only slightly differently) followed the logic of the spectacle to its charnel house conclusion. If, to trot out Debord’s over-famous aphorism again, ‘the spectacle is capital accumulated to the point where it becomes image’, [8] then what more adequate encapsulation of the process could there be but the World Trade Centre (with its multiplication of the terminally gigantic by two)? And what other means of defeating it—its social instrumentality, that is, its power over the consuming imagination—than have it be literally obliterated on camera?

We are rehearsing a logic, not endorsing it. But we believe that only by recognizing what was truly ‘modern’ in the martyr-pilots’ strategy—truly the opposite of a desperate, powerless, atavistic pinprick; truly the instigator of the state’s present agony—will the Left be able to move toward argument with the new terrorism’s premises and upshots, something it has not yet begun to do. At the level of the image (here is premise number one) the state is vulnerable; and that level is now fully part of, necessary to, the state’s apparatus of self-reproduction.

Terror can take over the image-machinery for a moment—and a moment, in the timeless echo-chamber of the spectacle, may now eternally be all there is—and use it to amplify, reiterate, accumulate the sheer visible happening of defeat. It is a confirmation of the terrorists’ hopes that after the first days, in the us, the fall of the Towers became exactly the image that had not to be shown. [9] The taboo only made the after-image more palpable and effective. Everything in the culture went on, and still goes on, in relation to that past image-event; nothing in the culture can address the event directly.

The silence of so-called ‘popular culture’ in the face of September 11 has been deafening. (It is as if the commercial music of America in the mid-twentieth century had had nothing to say about war, or race, or the Depression, or the new world of goods and appliances. It had plenty—partly because the adjective ‘popular’ still pointed to something real about its audiences and raw materials. That was long ago, of course: the present total obedience of the culture industry to the protocols of the war on terror—its immediate ingestion and reproduction of the state’s interdicts and paranoias—is proof positive, if any were needed, of the snuffing out of the last traces of insubordination in the studios of TimeWarner.)


The logic of the pilots was part fantasy, we would argue, part (proven) lucidity. We could reply to it by saying that the new terrorists succumbed to the temptation of the spectacle, rather than devising a way to outflank or contest it. They were exponents of the idea (brilliant exponents, but this only reveals the idea’s fundamental heartlessness) that control over the image is now the key to social power.

And that image-power, like all other forms of ownership and ascendancy under capitalism, has been subject to an ineluctable process of concentration, so that it is now manifest in certain identifiable (targetable) places, monuments, pseudo-bodies, icons, logos, manufactured non-events; signs that in their very emptiness and worthlessness (the Twin Towers as architecture were perfect examples) rule the imaginary earth; and whose concentrated, materialized nullity gives terror a new chance—to frighten, demoralize, turn the world upside down.

Once upon a time (and still, as we write) bombers went out into the city with their sensible holdalls, or their windbreakers a little more tightly zipped than usual. Once upon a time the shrapnel sliced through livers and skulls in neighbourhood restaurants, street markets, dance halls, breeding the contagion of rumour in the narrow streets, sapping the will of a class or colonial enemy, driving its cadres back into the isolation—the demoralization—of ‘home’; eroding, that is, the patterns of sociability (patterns of fear and enforcement, yes, but embedded in a wider and deeper universe of loyalties) that had held a regime together.

Now a new breed of bomber has understood that in the society they are attacking such networks of sociability are secondary: not absent, not irrelevant, but increasingly supplanted by a ghost sociability which does not need its citizens to leave home for its key rituals and allegiances to reproduce themselves. The terror of September 11 had a handful of targets (our tendency to make it, in memory, simply ‘the bombing of the Twin Towers’ is not untrue to the logic of the event).

The perpetrators knew full well that they lacked the means to spread out through the wider social fabric and bring ordinary doings to a halt. And they believed, rightly or wrongly, that in present circumstances they did not need to. What they did was designed to hold us indoors, to make us turn back and back to a moving image of capitalism screaming and exploding, to make us go on listening (in spite of ourselves) to the odious talking heads trying to put something, anything, in place of the desolation. [end excerpts]{my bolding, pure}

----
**
'' 'retort' is a gathering of council communists and affiliated nay-sayers, based for the past two decades in the San Francisco Bay Area. Involved in the writing of the present essay were Iain Boal, T. J. Clark, Joseph Matthews and Michael Watts. "

 

[upfront]

The Wingy Dragon said,

I was taught many years ago, to understand your enemy think like them. The enemy is winning because they think differently. They will continue to have Moore and his left wing supporting them even though they don't think they are.

America is not ready to deal with terrorist. We are not willing to fight the war they are. I was taught in the Special Forces if you want to win the battle think and act like your enemy.

Our troops will never be allowed to do that. We'll have Hollywood influencing America from now on. Our soldiers will never be allowed to fight the battle they should fight. Welcome to Vietnam. Welcome to the left winning and talking out of the side of their mouth about supporting our troops while they support this film.

Sorry for the ranting, but this is one old soldiers view. Other than seasparks, this seems like a left wing posting site.

Your analysis hasn't progressed much beyond the movie "Green Berets," and you seem pretty identified with John Wayne.

The idea, 'we could have won if allowed to fight' is particularly discredited, since the French tried it in Algeria, and (ta da) it failed spectacularly.

Further news: This is not a particularly 'left wing' site, as Lucifer noted. It has some articulate liberals (defined as mildly left). By your Reaganeque non-thought, anyone who wants state support for paraplegic single moms is right out there with Lenin. Lucifer_Carroll on the 'left', is scarcely typical. There is, here, a paucity of leftists and anarchists.

Just for the record, and for those who define liberal in terms of Harper's and Village Voice, here's a little LEFT analysis I rather liked:

http://www.newleftreview.net/NLR26101.shtml

New Left Review 27, May-June 2004

The current global conjuncture as a collision between brute imperial interests and blunders in hegemonic control of the image-world. State power and spectacular warfare after September 11, in the view of the Bay Area’s Situationist collective.


RETORT:

AFFLICTED POWERS--

The State, the Spectacle and September 11


He too fought under television for our place in the sun.
Robert Lowell on Lieutenant Calley, 1971


We begin from the moment in February 2003 when the tapestry copy of Picasso’s Guernica hung in the anteroom to the un Security Council Chamber was curtained over, at American insistence—not ‘an appropriate backdrop’, it was explained, for official statements to the world media on the forthcoming invasion of Iraq. [1] The episode became an emblem. Many a placard on Piccadilly or Market Street rang sardonic changes on Bush and the snorting bull. An emblem, yes—but, with the benefit of hindsight, emblematic of what? Of the state’s relentless will to control the minutiae of appearance, as part of—essential to—its drive to war? Well, certainly.

But in this case, did it get its way? Did not the boorishness of the effort at censorship prove counterproductive, eliciting the very haunting—by an imagery still capable of putting a face on the brutal abstraction of ‘shock and awe’—that the velcro covering was meant to put a stop to? And did not the whole incident speak above all to the state’s anxiety as it tried to micro-manage the means of symbolic production—as if it feared that every last detail of the derealized decor it had built for its citizens had the potential, at a time of crisis, to turn utterly against it?

These are the ambiguities, generalized to the whole conduct of war and politics over the past three years, that this essay will explore. We start from the premise that certain concepts and descriptions put forward forty years ago by Guy Debord and the Situationist International, as part of their effort to comprehend the new forms of state control and social disintegration, still possess explanatory power—more so than ever, we suspect, in the poisonous epoch we are living through. In particular, the twinned notions of ‘the colonization of everyday life’ and ‘the society of the spectacle’—we think each concept needs the other if it is to do its proper work—strike us as having purchase on key aspects of what has happened since September 11, 2001.

Our purpose, in a word, is to turn two central Situationist hypotheses back to the task for which they were always primarily intended—to make them instruments of political analysis again, directed to an understanding of the powers and vulnerabilities of the capitalist state. (We take it we are not alone in shuddering at the way ‘spectacle’ has taken its place in approved postmodern discourse over the past 15 years, as a vaguely millenarian accompaniment to ‘new media studies’ or to wishful thinking about freedom in cyberspace, with never a whisper that its original objects were the Watts Riots and the Proletarian Cultural Revolution.)

None of this means that we think we comprehend the whole shape and dynamic of the new state of affairs, or can offer a theory of its deepest determinations. We are not sectaries of the spectacle; no one concept, or cluster of concepts, seems to us to get the measure of the horror of the past three years. We even find it understandable, if in the end a mistake, that some on the Left have seen the recent wars in the desert and squabbles in the Security Council as open to analysis in classical Marxist terms, proudly unreconstructed—bringing on stage again the predictions and revulsions of Lenin’s and Hobson’s studies of imperialism—rather than in those of a new politics of ‘internal’, technologized social control.

The present dark circumstances call for fresh political thought. No attempt at such thinking can avoid three obvious, interlinked questions:


To what extent did the events of September 11, 2001—the precision bombing of New York and Washington by organized enemies of the us Empire—usher in a new era? Did those events change anything fundamental in the calculus and conduct of advanced capitalist states, or in the relation of such states to their civil societies? If so, how?


Are we to understand the forms of assertion of American power since September 11—the naïve demonstration of military supremacy (largely to reassure the demonstrators that ‘something could still be done’ with the monstrous armoury at the state’s beck and call), the blundering attempts at recolonization under way in Afghanistan and Iraq, the threats and payoffs to client states in every corner of the globe, the glowering attack on civil liberties within the us itself—as a step backwards, a historical regression, in which the molecular, integral, invisible means of control which so many of us believed were indispensable to a truly ‘modern’ state-system have given way to a new/old era of gunboats and book-burning?


Do the concepts ‘society of the spectacle’ and ‘colonization of everyday life’ help us to grasp the logic of the present age? Or has the level of social dispersal and mendaciousness to which those concepts once pointed also been overtaken—displaced, abruptly, at a special moment of urgency and arrogance—by cruder, older imperatives of statecraft?

None of these questions, to repeat, can be answered in isolation. No one level of analysis—‘economic’ or ‘political’, global or local, focusing on the means of either material or symbolic production—will do justice to the current strange mixture of chaos and grand design. But one major aspect of the story—the struggle for mastery in the realm of the image—has so far barely been thought of as positively interacting with others more familiar and ‘material’. It is the first outline of this interaction that we aim to offer, for further debate.

II

The version of ‘spectacle’ with which we operate is minimal, pragmatic, matter of fact. No doubt the idea’s original author often gave it an exultant, world-historical force. But his tone is inimitable, as all efforts to duplicate it have proved; and in any case we are convinced that the age demands a different cadence—something closer (if we are lucky) to that of the lines from Paradise Lost we use as our pamphlet’s epigraph [2] than to anything from Lukács or Ducasse.

The notion ‘spectacle’ was intended, then, as a first stab at characterizing a new form of, or stage in, the accumulation of capital. What it named preeminently was the submission of more and more facets of human sociability—areas of everyday life, forms of recreation, patterns of speech, idioms of local solidarity, kinds of ethical or aesthetic insubordination, the endless capacities of human beings to evade or refuse the orders brought down to them from on high—to the deadly solicitations (the lifeless bright sameness) of the market.

Those who developed the analysis in the first place resisted the idea that this colonization of everyday life was dependent on any one set of technologies, but notoriously they were interested in the means modern societies have at their disposal to systematize and disseminate appearances, and to subject the texture of day-to-day living to a constant barrage of images, instructions, slogans, logos, false promises, virtual realities, miniature happiness-motifs. Batteries Not Included, as the old punk band had it.

The choice of the word ‘colonization’ to describe the process was deliberate. It invited readers to conceive of the invasion and sterilizing of so many unoccupied areas of human species-being—areas that previous regimes, however overweaning, had chosen (or been obliged) to leave alone—as a specific necessity of capitalist production, just as much part of its dynamism as expansion to the ends of the earth.

The colonization of everyday life, we might put it from our present vantage point, was ‘globalization’ turned inward—mapping and enclosing the hinterland of the social, and carving out from the detail of human inventiveness an ever more ramified and standardized market of exchangeable subjectivities. Naturally the one colonization implied the other: there would have been no Black Atlantic of sugars, alcohols and opiates without the drive to shape subjectivity into a pattern of small (saleable) addictions.

The point of the analysis, again, was to bring into focus the terms and possibilities of resistance (wars of liberation) against the colonizing forces; this in a situation, the later 1960s, where it was not foolhardy, even if ultimately mistaken, to imagine ‘reassembling our afflicted Powers’ and doing real harm to the enemy.

Debord, to speak of him directly, was concerned most of all with the way the subjection of social life to the rule of appearances had led, in turn, to a distinct form of politics—of state formation and surveillance. His opinion on these matters fluctuated: they were the aspect of the present he most loathed, and which regularly elicited his best tirades and worst paranoia. We extract the following propositions from his pages.

First, that slowly but surely the state in the twentieth century had been dragged into full collaboration in the micro-management of everyday life. The market’s necessity became the state’s obsession. (Slowly, and in a sense against the state’s better judgement, because always there existed a tension between the modern state’s armoured other-directedness—its raison d’être as a war machine—and capital’s insistence that the state come to its aid in the great work of internal policing and packaging. This tension has again been visible over the past three years. We believe it is one key to the obvious incoherence of the state’s recent actions.)

Second, this deeper and deeper involvement of the state in the day-to-day instrumentation of consumer obedience meant that increasingly it came to live or die by its investment in, and control of, the field of images—the alternative world conjured up by the new battery of ‘perpetual emotion machines’ [3] of which tv was the dim pioneer and which now beckons the citizen every waking minute. This world of images had long been a structural necessity of a capitalism oriented toward the overproduction of commodities, and therefore the constant manufacture of desire for them; but by the late twentieth century it had given rise to a specific polity.

The modern state, we would argue, has come to need weak citizenship. It depends more and more on maintaining an impoverished and hygienized public realm, in which only the ghosts of an older, more idiosyncratic civil society live on. It has adjusted profoundly to its economic master’s requirement for a thinned, unobstructed social texture, made up of loosely attached consumer subjects, each locked in its plastic work-station and nuclearized family of four.

Weak citizenship, but for that very reason the object of the state’s constant, anxious attention—an unstoppable barrage of idiot fashions and panics and image-motifs, all aimed at sewing the citizen back (unobtrusively, ‘individually’) into a deadly simulacrum of community.

At times, the first writers to confront this nightmare seemed to despair in the face of it:

There is no place left where people can discuss the realities which concern them, because they can never lastingly free themselves from the crushing presence of media discourse and of the various forces organized to relay it . . . Unanswerable lies have succeeded in eliminating public opinion, which first lost the ability to make itself heard and then very quickly dissolved altogether . . . Once one controls the mechanism which operates the only form of social verification to be fully and universally recognized, one can say what one likes . . . Spectacular power can similarly deny whatever it wishes to, once, or three times over, and change the subject: knowing full well there is no danger of riposte, in its own space or any other. [4]

Too many times over the past twelve months these sentences, in their anger and sorrow at the present form of politics, have echoed in our minds. But ultimately we dissent from their totalizing closure. Living after September 11, we are no longer so sure—and do not believe that spectacular power is sure—that ‘there is no danger of riposte, in its own space or any other’. For better or worse, the precision bombings were such a riposte. And their effect on the spectacular state has been profound: the state’s reply to them, we are certain, has exceeded in its crassness and futility the martyr-pilots’ wildest dreams.

Therefore we turn to another sentence from the same book, which (characteristically) acts as finale to the previous admissions of defeat. ‘To this list of the triumphs of power we should add, however, one result which has proved negative: once the running of the state involves a permanent and massive shortage of historical knowledge, that state can no longer be led strategically.’ [5] Issued by a devotee of Sun Tzu and Clausewitz, this last verdict is crushing.

Debord had a robust and straightforward view of the necessity, for individuals and collectives, of learning from the past (not the least of the ways in which his thinking is classical, as opposed to postmodern). Of course he knew that the past is a ‘construction’; but of obdurate and three-dimensional materials, he believed, constantly resisting any one frame, and which only the most elaborate machinery of forgetting could make fully tractable to power.

His deepest fears as a revolutionary derived from the sense, which grew upon him, that this elaborate machinery might now have been built, and really be turning the world into an eternal present. That was the key to his hatred of the image-life: that what it threatened, ultimately, was the very existence of the complex, created, two-way temporality that for him constituted the essence of the human.

Such was the nightmare. But even Debord sometimes took (cold) comfort from the recognition that the state too lived the nightmare, and would suffer the consequences. For it too could no longer learn from the past: it had progressively dismantled the contexts in which truly strategic discussion of its aims and interests—thinking in the long term, admitting the paradoxes and uncertainties of power, recognizing, in a word, ‘the cunning of reason’—might still be possible.

The state was entrapped in its own apparatus of clichés. It had come almost to believe in the policy-motifs its think-tanks and disinformation consultancies churned out for it. How Debord would have revelled, over the past year, in the endless double entendres provided by the media, to the effect that Bush and Blair’s rush to war in Iraq should be blamed on ‘faulty intelligence’!

III

What, then, politically and strategically, took place on September 11, 2001? And how, politically and strategically, has the us state responded to it? Of course, we realize the dangers here. Why should we follow the lead of the spectacle itself in electing this one among many atrocities—raised to the new power of ideology, inevitably, by the idiot device of digitalizing its dateline—as a world-historical turning point? How much of the real dynamic (and pathology) of American power is conjured away by pinning it thus to a single image-event—in much the same way that American victory in the Cold War was rendered in retrospect magical, unanalysable, by the mantra ‘The Fall of the Wall’?

There have been moments when we found it easy to sympathize with those of our comrades who, partly in reaction to the flood of cloying, pseudo-apocalyptic verbiage released by September 11 (which shows no sign of abating), go so far as to dismiss the bombings as so many pinpricks, attentats, hopeless symbolic gestures on the part of those with no real power to wound.

‘Hopeless symbolic gestures.’ We agree quite strictly with all three words of the diagnosis. (As do the perpetrators, it seems. In them chiliasm is spliced with nihilism, to form a distinctively hyper-modern compound. When they boast in their communiqués of being ‘for Death’—in contradistinction, they imply, to modernity’s miserable attachment to a Life not worth the name—one is never sure if one is hearing Tyndale’s cry from the stake or Stavrogin’s in the last pages of The Possessed.

As so often lately, the twenty-first century seems an amalgam of the sixteenth and nineteenth.) And the question remains: what is the effectiveness—the specific political force—of this form of symbolic action, hopeless or not, within the symbolic economy called ‘spectacle’? Spectacularly, the American state suffered a defeat on September 11. And spectacularly, for this state, does not mean superficially or epiphenomenally. The state was wounded in September in its heart of hearts, and we see it still, three years later, flailing blindly in the face of an image it cannot exorcize, and trying desperately to convert the defeat back into terms it can respond to.

One last caveat. It should hardly be necessary to state that, if we refuse to extract the September bombings from the cycle of horrors over which the us has presided since 1945, and believe it necessary, if we are to understand them politically, to treat the events of September as an occurrence in a war of images, it is not because we fail to recognize (and wish we could find words for) the obscenity of those events. On the contrary, precisely because the attacks in September were calibrated to leave an indelible image-trail behind them, they have seared in the memory item after item of evidence of just what it is, in terms of human fear and agony, that political calculus so habitually writes off.

We too are haunted by the flailing arms of the jumpers, and the scream on the soundtrack as the tower stutters into dust; just as we are haunted by the image of Hanadi Jaradat’s bloody head, ‘her thick hair tied in a ponytail’, dumped by the clean-up squad on a table at the back of the restaurant in Haifa she had blown to pieces an hour before. [6] We wish we had words for these things. We wish we lived in a political culture where the language of revulsion had not been debauched by decade after decade of selective gravitas. (Your Chechnya for my Guatemala. Your Suharto for my Pol Pot.)

We proceed then, unwillingly, from the image on the screen. It matters profoundly that the horrors of September 11 were designed above all to be visible, and that this visibility marked the bombings off from most previous campaigns of air terror, especially those sponsored by states. There were no cameras at Dresden, Hamburg, Hiroshima. [7] The horror there had to be unseen; it had to act—was meant to act—on the surrounding population in the form of uncontrollable hearsay and panic; and it was to be presented to the enemy state apparatus in the form of report, statistic, prediction, ultimatum.

September’s terror was different. It made no demands, it offered no explanations. It was premised on the belief (learned from the culture it tried to annihilate) that a picture is worth a thousand words—that a picture, in the present condition of politics, is itself, if sufficiently well-executed, a specific and effective piece of statecraft. Of course the martyr-pilots knew that bringing down the Twin Towers would do nothing, or next to nothing, to stop the actual circuits of capital. But circuits of capital are bound up, in the longer term, with circuits of sociability—patterns of belief and desire, levels of confidence, degrees of identification with the good life of the commodity. And these, said the terrorists, thinking strategically, are aspects of the social imaginary still (always, interminably) being put together by the perpetual emotion machines.

Supposing those machines could be captured for a moment, and on them appeared the perfect image of capitalism’s negation. Would that not be enough? Enough truly to destabilize the state and society, and produce a sequence of vauntings and paranoias whose long-term political consequences for the capitalist world order would, at the very least, be unpredictable?

Or perhaps entirely predictable, from a geopolitical standpoint. ‘You know our demands’, said the martyr-pilots (strictly to themselves). ‘And we know you cannot accede to them. We know what you will do instead. We are certain your answer will be military. We anticipate your idiot leader blurting out the word crusade. What you will do will vindicate our analysis point by point, humiliation by humiliation, and confirm the world of Islamism in its despairing strength. And you will do it because there is no answer to our image-victory, yet you (because humiliation is something in which you have no schooling) have to pretend there is one.’

The terrorists (to put it only slightly differently) followed the logic of the spectacle to its charnel house conclusion. If, to trot out Debord’s over-famous aphorism again, ‘the spectacle is capital accumulated to the point where it becomes image’, [8] then what more adequate encapsulation of the process could there be but the World Trade Centre (with its multiplication of the terminally gigantic by two)? And what other means of defeating it—its social instrumentality, that is, its power over the consuming imagination—than have it be literally obliterated on camera?

We are rehearsing a logic, not endorsing it. But we believe that only by recognizing what was truly ‘modern’ in the martyr-pilots’ strategy—truly the opposite of a desperate, powerless, atavistic pinprick; truly the instigator of the state’s present agony—will the Left be able to move toward argument with the new terrorism’s premises and upshots, something it has not yet begun to do. At the level of the image (here is premise number one) the state is vulnerable; and that level is now fully part of, necessary to, the state’s apparatus of self-reproduction.

Terror can take over the image-machinery for a moment—and a moment, in the timeless echo-chamber of the spectacle, may now eternally be all there is—and use it to amplify, reiterate, accumulate the sheer visible happening of defeat. It is a confirmation of the terrorists’ hopes that after the first days, in the us, the fall of the Towers became exactly the image that had not to be shown. [9] The taboo only made the after-image more palpable and effective. Everything in the culture went on, and still goes on, in relation to that past image-event; nothing in the culture can address the event directly.

The silence of so-called ‘popular culture’ in the face of September 11 has been deafening. (It is as if the commercial music of America in the mid-twentieth century had had nothing to say about war, or race, or the Depression, or the new world of goods and appliances. It had plenty—partly because the adjective ‘popular’ still pointed to something real about its audiences and raw materials. That was long ago, of course: the present total obedience of the culture industry to the protocols of the war on terror—its immediate ingestion and reproduction of the state’s interdicts and paranoias—is proof positive, if any were needed, of the snuffing out of the last traces of insubordination in the studios of TimeWarner.)


The logic of the pilots was part fantasy, we would argue, part (proven) lucidity. We could reply to it by saying that the new terrorists succumbed to the temptation of the spectacle, rather than devising a way to outflank or contest it. They were exponents of the idea (brilliant exponents, but this only reveals the idea’s fundamental heartlessness) that control over the image is now the key to social power.

And that image-power, like all other forms of ownership and ascendancy under capitalism, has been subject to an ineluctable process of concentration, so that it is now manifest in certain identifiable (targetable) places, monuments, pseudo-bodies, icons, logos, manufactured non-events; signs that in their very emptiness and worthlessness (the Twin Towers as architecture were perfect examples) rule the imaginary earth; and whose concentrated, materialized nullity gives terror a new chance—to frighten, demoralize, turn the world upside down.

Once upon a time (and still, as we write) bombers went out into the city with their sensible holdalls, or their windbreakers a little more tightly zipped than usual. Once upon a time the shrapnel sliced through livers and skulls in neighbourhood restaurants, street markets, dance halls, breeding the contagion of rumour in the narrow streets, sapping the will of a class or colonial enemy, driving its cadres back into the isolation—the demoralization—of ‘home’; eroding, that is, the patterns of sociability (patterns of fear and enforcement, yes, but embedded in a wider and deeper universe of loyalties) that had held a regime together.

Now a new breed of bomber has understood that in the society they are attacking such networks of sociability are secondary: not absent, not irrelevant, but increasingly supplanted by a ghost sociability which does not need its citizens to leave home for its key rituals and allegiances to reproduce themselves. The terror of September 11 had a handful of targets (our tendency to make it, in memory, simply ‘the bombing of the Twin Towers’ is not untrue to the logic of the event).

The perpetrators knew full well that they lacked the means to spread out through the wider social fabric and bring ordinary doings to a halt. And they believed, rightly or wrongly, that in present circumstances they did not need to. What they did was designed to hold us indoors, to make us turn back and back to a moving image of capitalism screaming and exploding, to make us go on listening (in spite of ourselves) to the odious talking heads trying to put something, anything, in place of the desolation. [end excerpts]

Fuck me backwards ... let me get myself a drink!

 

[Pure]

A couple other 'left' articles for those interested.

http://www.newleftreview.net/NLR24703.shtml

LOÏC WACQUANT

FROM SLAVERY TO MASS INCARCERATION

Rethinking the ‘race question’ in the US

The fate of US blacks, from the time of Jefferson to that of Reagan and Clinton, trapped within four successive ‘peculiar institutions’, under a sociological spotlight. The origins of American racism and its outcomes in today’s hyperghetto and prison regimes.

-----
http://www.newleftreview.net/NLR24804.shtml

GÜNTER GRASS and PIERRE BOURDIEU [in dialogue]

THE ‘PROGRESSIVE’ RESTORATION

A Franco-German exchange between novelist and sociologist on the success of neoliberalism in transforming political regression into the standard of social progress; and the fate of the Enlightenment in the two leading cultures of the European Union.

 

[psychocatblah]

Thank God. Now we're talking.I can see both sides of the evil-versus-stupid issue. It's a tough call. Which is better?Ahem. (1) You and Dan Rather hadn't been receiving intelligence briefings that warned of an attack by terrorists using hijacked planes. No wonder you and Dan Rather were caught off-guard.(2) You and Dan Rather hadn't volunteered to be America's go-to man in a crisis.

Given that Richard Clarke had all but spray-painted the White House with the words, "Osama. Planes. Kaboom," total surprise is not even on the tick-list of choices for what might have been on Dubya's mind when the 2nd plane hit.

"I'm screwed," merits consideration, right behind, "I'd better sit perfectly still until the end of 'My Pet Goat,' or these children will be traumatized," and "I hope Dick knows what to do." Last on the list, though I hestitate to include it, is, "I wonder what happens to the goat."

I'm not sure which is better or worse, evil or stupid. I guess stupid would be more comforting to me, personally. I'd really hope that no one would be so evil as to willingly have so many people killed over oil money. There again clearly a lot of people do such things for money whether I believe they're doing it or not.

But really you're illustrating the point of W: the blundering dunderhead or evil plotter. Yes he'd volunteered to be the go to guy, Dan Rather was paid rather well for his ability to commentate. Title does not dictate behavior. And I think even Moore made it clear that despite Clarke's attempts, W simply wasn't reading those reports. Again, was that because he knew it already and he was deviously in cahoots with wanting something to happen or was it because he's nothing but a figurehead and he figured daddy or someone who... I don't know... knew how to read would look at it?

Maybe he had read the reports and was assured that something was going to be done about it? That would be stupor-inducing.

But this whole back and forth is really why I came out of it not sure if I thought Bush was evil or just stupid. I think Moore presents a case for either. Although mostly the point is that no matter which the man is; he shouldn't be in office.

I could've told you that 4 years ago. Not that I at all expected Nader to win, but again, being in Texas I knew Bush would with the electoral so it didn't much matter. If we didn't have the electoral, though, I would've voted for Gore. But popular vote vs. electoral college is a debate for another thread. I don't think anyone likes it aside from politicians who can work the system to their advantage.

 

[shereads]

Hollywood wanted nothing to do with this film? I find that hard to believe.

This week's Newsweek Magazine (the "Adultery Cover" ) has an article about Lions Gate Films, the Canadian independent that rescued Farenheit 9/11 after Miramax, the original distributor, was ordered to dump it by parent co. Disney.

Here's their website: http://www.lionsgatefilms.com

Being right all the time is exhausting! Cut me some slack here, Dragon. If you say you don't believe something, I'm compelled to prove it. It's a sickness. It's causing me to neglect my elderly mother, a heart patient! A conservative heart patient. Who was married to an Air Force pilot! Do you really want to harm an innocent old woman, when you could enrich her life simply by accepting that her daughter, shereads, has approximately a 97.6% RATT Factor?

(RATT = Right All The Time)

You think it's easy to maintain that ratio of rightness, especially while leaning to the left? It's not!

Speaking of how tiring and stressful it is to stay on top of current events, has anyone else noticed that GWB is remarkably unaffected by the typical signs of rapid aging that have affected every other president during the first term in office? You know how they suddenly go gray, or lose/gain weight dramatically, or show a lot of stress wrinkles at the forehead and around the eyes, and how people attribute it to the incredible stress of being in charge of the world's most powerful and diverse country?

GWB looks fresh as a daisy. It's like he's the Alfred E. Newman of presidents.

"What? Me, worry?"

 

[Guest]

GWB looks fresh as a daisy. It's like he's the Alfred E. Newman of presidents.
"What? Me, worry?"

That is so perfect. It explains so much. Thank you! P.

 

[shereads]

The idea, 'we could have won if allowed to fight' is particularly discredited, since the French tried it in Algeria, and (ta da) it failed spectacularly.

But isn't there a danger that the U.S. will fall into the same trap that caused the Soviets to fail in Afganistan? You remember, right? How the Kremlin caved to pressure from the anti-war demonstrators and ordered their military to be nicer to the locals, observe the Geneva Conventions when questioning prisoners about the Afghan resistance? And how the Soviets foolishly slashed military spending to placate the intellectual elite?

Wait a second...I must be confused. The Soviets didn't do any of that stuff; in fact they tortured prisoners in Afghanistan and imprisoned anti-war dissenters at home, not to mention bringing their economy to the brink of bankruptcy and sacrificing so many of their young people. And they lost anyway.

It's not that America didn't learn anything from Vietnam; it's that we learned two entirely different lessons. Those who blame the anti-war movement for our loss in Vietnam, or who think that throwing more money and lives into it, or "bombing them back to the Stone Age,' would have led to a positive outcome, are ignoring the most compelling parallel to ours in Southeast Asia. The Soviets can hardly be accused of having been weakened by sentimentality. They failed despite there being no messy Bill of Rights to silence internal dissent; they were known to torture prisoners despite having no "liberal media" to blame for bringing the news back home. Low troop morale couldn't be blamed on any outside force, either. Just a bunch of kids who were increasingly aware that their mission was bogus.

 

[Pure]

Thought of the day.

TERROR

Terror as a political instrument, in other words, is the property of the state (maybe the founding property of the state in its ‘modern’ manifestation), or of those thinking like a state. Its purest exponents are the Churchills of the world.

‘I do not understand this squeamishness about the use of gas . . . I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilized tribes [to] spread a lively terror’:

Churchill in 1920, as Secretary of State at the War Office, justifying his authorization of raf Middle East Command to use chemical weapons ‘against recalcitrant Arabs’, quoted in Geoff Simons, Iraq: From Sumer to Saddam, New York 1994, p. xiv.

 

[Guest]

"Fahrenheit" On The Brain - Who cares if Moore's flick is flawed, shameless propaganda? At least it makes America think - Mark Morford, SF Gate , July 7, 2004

Click to View Click to View Oh my God but Michael Moore is infuriating.

He has made a massively flawed quasi-documentary that treads dangerously close to excessive propaganda, a movie that never lets BushCo have the slightest hint of breathing space (not that they really deserve it), and he zooms his camera in on the distraught faces of weeping mothers and tormented soldiers and holds the lens there far too long, making you go, OK OK, enough already with the misery porn and the emo-manipulation.

Moore takes numerous cheap shots and finds far too many easy targets among the political elite, and he cleverly edits his footage to make the various politicians he skewers appear even more vacuous and slithery and alien and sad than they normally might, which is already quite a lot, I mean oh my God what the hell is wrong with Dick Cheney I mean the man is pure sneering vileness incarnate just by opening his tiny black eyes. Shudder.

"Fahrenheit 9/11" is packed with missed opportunities. It argues obvious points far too weakly and never really digs very far, or very coherently, into the sinister underbelly of How It All Really Works.

And Moore never lays sufficient blame on the weak-kneed Demos, all of whom voted for BushCo's war and all of whom basically rolled over and begged for scraps when the GOP war machine steamrolled in and demanded the nation cower in fear so they could attack a wimpy volatile hate-filled pip-squeak nation that dared to threaten its global petrochemical interests.

However. "Fahrenheit 9/11" is also shockingly stirring and thought provoking, the first major film of its kind to ever smack down a sitting president and his heartless, hawk-filled administration so successfully, so clearly, so shamelessly. It is propaganda made fresh, inspired, explosive, irrefutable.

And you know it's working. After all, when's the last time a documentary filmmaker became the target of the full force of the GOP spin machine? When's the last time anyone made any sort of attempt to seriously question, in public, fearlessly, unapologetically, in a mass-media format, the blatantly oily warmongering of a current administration?

When's the last time a documentary -- not to mention one seriously calling into doubt the snide motives of our government's call to war -- was the No. 1 movie in the nation while the war was still under way? Never, that's when.

This, then, is the fabulous thing about Moore's flick. Sure, most of what the movie reveals might seem painfully obvious to anyone who follows the news with any sort of intellectual dexterity. And, yes, most of what Moore uncovers about everything from BushCo's appalling Saudi oil connections and his administration's whorelike corporate favoritism and the stealing of the '00 election you've heard a thousand times before.

But no one has yet strung these facts and events together in any substantive way in the popular media. No one has had the casual nerve to show how deep and far back BushCo's Saudi ties actually run (hint: way, way back), letting us know who it is who really signs Bush's paycheck (hint: it ain't the taxpayers).

No one has so successfully put a package together that can actually be successfully digested by the "average" American citizen, the vast majority of whom, it must be noted, blithely believe the major media spin and Fox News' alarmism and never really question their government, never get to hear any sort of smart, anarchic message, never see the dank underbelly revealed in any substantive, comprehensible, entertaining, humorous, intelligent way. And, for this, you have to fall down in front of Moore's film in abject thanks.

After all, we're Americans. We tend to forget very quickly how it was just after BushCo was elected, or just after 9/11, or just after the war on Iraq was declared. We forget how thoroughly the GOP-fueled fear saturated the country's air like a rank perfume, how rabid patriotism was our national drug, how violent warmongering was forced upon us like some sort of mandatory, painful surgery, the only option for a heartbroken, exhausted nation. Take a moment. Try to remember.

Remember how timid and appallingly pro-war the media was during the launch of Operation Iraqi Freedom. Remember Ashcroft's vicious USA Patriot Act. Remember the orgasmic glee of the "embedded" reporters who were allowed to ride on big scary tanks and speed across the desert in big impressive convoys of U.S. killing machines, as meanwhile, just outside the camera's range, thousands of mutilated corpses of babies and women and other innocent civilians lay in the rubble as the "real" war raged on, just out of the American public's view.

And remember how you thought, oh my God, something is so not right about this. Something is terribly unsound about our thinking and methodology and macho gun-totin' kill-'em-all isolationist Texas swaggerin' approach to the world. This is not a war for freedom. This is not a war for the safety of American soil. Bush is marching us straight into a hellish quagmire, and no one seems to be asking why.

"Fahrenheit 9/11" then, isn't just a movie. It's a breakthrough. A reminder that a nation not only can, but should, ask why. Moore has taken the most successful initiative to date to rip away the veil of fear the GOP had laid over the nation like a stifling blanket, one that had, until recently, kept everyone from pundits to politicians from speaking out and disagreeing with BushCo's rancid stew of lies and misdirects and fearmongerings, lest they be instantly branded an America-hating liberal tree hugger communist who sleeps with Osama.

Which is, of course, exactly what the GOP is trying to do with Moore, right now, calling him an enemy of the state, a traitor, an America hater, a liar and a cheater and sodomite and pedophile and fat slobbish hypocritical pig and goddammit how dare you use that footage of Bush sitting there like a stunned blank-faced monkey at that preschool for seven full minutes after he was informed that a second plane had rammed into the WTC and that the nation was under terrorist attack?

I mean, no wonder the GOP is all frothy. Not only does the film make Bush appear even more of a bumbling, inarticulate dolt than usual (which required, admittedly, nearly zero effort on Moore's part), but it reveals him to be so appallingly disconnected, so politically spoon fed, so completely and frighteningly lost, you can't help but realize who the real threat to America's health and safety really is.

It's also easy to disagree with Moore's own implied politics, a truly annoying mishmash stance that seems to support more troops and more aggression in Afghanistan on the one hand, while at the same time decrying attacking Iraq and painting Baghdad as some sort of gentle happy harmless utopia before the U.S. stomped in and tore apart Saddam's blissful Eden.

Moore has been attacked, often rightfully so, for his scattershot politics, his implied hypocrisy, perhaps no better and more pointedly than by prolific political wonkhead and rabid gin aficionado Christopher Hitchens, who decimates Moore and his movie on every level (Hitchens makes no apologies: he just really, really hates MM) in his mostly excellent, if mostly hysterical, Slate editorial.

But, in the end, Moore's own politics, and his film's unapologetic propagandist bent, don't really matter. What matters is how the movie has helped make radical dissent a healthy part of American discourse again. How Moore has reopened the gates of independent thought and proved that the GOP's famous lightning bolts of spin and hate did not strike him dead as he did so. Helluva gift to the nation, that.

And when you combine "Fahrenheit 9/11" with another, less polemical, more straightforwardly frightening must-see documentary that's out now called "The Hunting of the President," which delineates the GOP's shockingly savage, calculated, historic attempt to destroy Bill Clinton, you've got a portrait of a Republican Party that makes the frayed ragtag fundamentalist nutballs of the Taliban look like the participants at some sort of Tupperware party.

Look. You can disagree with Moore's opinions and his often patronizing conclusions all you want. But you can't, after all, refute his facts. Moore's movie has done more than merely free up the pundits and the disgruntled military generals to speak out, or make timid reporters actually dig for truth again. He has done more than help put surprising words of dissent and criticism back into the mouths of members of Congress and the major media.

He has, in short, made Middle America think again. He has cracked the GOP's frozen ideological sea, showed us all one thing we have so desperately forgotten: America does not, after all, have to be this way, and its citizens do, in fact, have a choice.

And, for that reason, "Fahrenheit 9/11" is perhaps the most wonderfully patriotic film ever made. url

 

[Pure]

Time has joined Newsweek in being snarky. I presume some Republican connections are in evidence. I find the Gibson comparison sneaky and far-fetched. The 'inaccuracies' exposed are pretty trivial, if not tendentious. The most serious point is that Moore didn 't trumpet what a bad guy Saddam was, torturing and all that; with the Americans bringing relief and freedom to the people. (I.e., MM did not act as a Pentagon PR man.)

Review in Time, can't tell if it's by Sullivan or Corliss.
At Time Canada's website.

July 12 2004



COVER STORY

The World According to Michael:
Taking aim at George W., a populist agitator makes noise, news and a new kind of political entertainment

By Richard Corliss
-----
[much preliminary material deleted; vague complaints, but referenced to MM's life and other movies. Half way through, some specifics are trotted out:]

[begin excerpts]
Accusation: Moore suggests that 142 Saudis, including 24 members of the bin Laden family, were allowed to leave the U.S. following 9/11 without adequate questioning by the FBI and at a time when civil aviation was grounded.

Clarification: One plane was permitted to leave before U.S. airspace was reopened on Sept. 13, but most Saudis flew out after that date. According to the 9/11 commission, the FBI interviewed 30 Saudis before they left, though it’s not clear how closely they were questioned.
----

Bush’s Money Ties

Accusation: Moore says Saudi interests invested $1.4 billion in firms connected to the Bush family and friends and speculates that this may have caused the President to divert attention from the involvement of Saudis in 9/11.

Clarification: Nearly $1.18 billion of that money was awarded to BDM, a U.S. defense contractor, for training the Saudi military. At the time, BDM was owned by the Carlyle Group, on whose advisory board George H.W. Bush served. But the elder Bush didn’t join that board until five months after Carlyle sold BDM.

The Afghan Pipeline

Accusation: Moore charges that Bush’s desire to promote a pipeline through Afghanistan influenced him initially to favor the country’s Taliban rulers.

Clarification: The pipeline was conceived during the Clinton years. Taliban leaders visited Houston in 1997 when Bush was Texas Governor but are not known to have met with him.
----
[...]
Viewpoint: Blinded by the Light

Sitting in the movie theater watching michael moore’s fahrenheit 9/11 amid an audience utterly riveted by a movie speaking to its deepest emotions, I kept getting a sense of déjà vu. Where had I felt such crowd dynamics before? And then I remembered. What I was sensing was eerily similar to the awestruck devotion I had noticed in another audience—this time of Fundamentalist Christians—as it watched Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ. Both movies were appealing to what might be called their cultural bases. They weren’t designed to persuade. They were designed to rally the faithful, to use the power of imagery to evoke gut sentiment, to rouse the already committed to various forms of hatred or adoration.

Gibson and Moore—two sides of the same coin? Absolutely. There are times when the far right and the far left are so close in methodology as to be indistinguishable. And both movies are not just terrible as movies—crude, boring, gratuitous; they are also deeply corrosive of the possibility of real debate and reason in our culture. They replace argument with feeling, reasoned persuasion with the rawest of group loyalties.

Compare a few of the techniques. Moore argues that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were designed only to enrich the Bush family with oil money. For Moore, Sept. 11 wasn’t the cause of the war on terrorism. It was a pretext for corruption. He cannot prove this, and so he tries to bludgeon the viewer emotionally to that conclusion. He uses innuendo, sly editing, parody, ridicule and somber voice-overs to give his mere assertions a patina of truth.Similarly with Gibson’s movie: there is no historical evidence that Jesus endured anything like the sadistic marathon that The Passion lovingly re-creates. But it is portrayed—at fantastical length and in excruciating detail—as historical fact. This is, Gibson wants you to believe, “as it was.”

Quibble with Moore, and he will accuse you of siding with the devil. Quibble with Gibson, and he will accuse you of opposing God.Both Moore and Gibson use ominous, swelling music. Both give us manipulative scenes of mothers grieving over dead sons as the emotive climaxes of their work. Both clean their narratives of anything that might give them depth or complexity. In Gibson’s case, this requires removing any thorough treatment of Jesus’ message—the whole point of his suffering. With Moore, it’s accomplished by omitting critical pieces of evidence or context—Bush’s success at decimating al-Qaeda’s leadership or the vileness of the police state of Saddam Hussein. These facts might add to viewers’ understanding. But they would detract from the ability to hate the President.{my bold, pure}

It is a sign of how far the culture war has gone in America that almost no one condemns both movies. For Fundamentalist red-staters, Gibson is a hero. For leftist blue-staters, Moore is, in the words of the New York Times, “a credit to the Republic.” The truth is that both movies are different but equally potent forms of cultural toxin—poisonous to debate, to reason and to civility. And the antidote is in shorter and shorter supply. -By Andrew Sullivan.
[end excerpts, end of article]

 

[shereads]

After all, we're Americans. We tend to forget very quickly how it was just after BushCo was elected, or just after 9/11, or just after the war on Iraq was declared. We forget how thoroughly the GOP-fueled fear saturated the country's air like a rank perfume, how rabid patriotism was our national drug, how violent warmongering was forced upon us like some sort of mandatory, painful surgery, the only option for a heartbroken, exhausted nation. Take a moment. Try to remember.

Remember how timid and appallingly pro-war the media was during the launch of Operation Iraqi Freedom. Remember Ashcroft's vicious USA Patriot Act. Remember the orgasmic glee of the "embedded" reporters who were allowed to ride on big scary tanks and speed across the desert in big impressive convoys of U.S. killing machines, as meanwhile, just outside the camera's range, thousands of mutilated corpses of babies and women and other innocent civilians lay in the rubble as the "real" war raged on, just out of the American public's view.

And remember how you thought, oh my God, something is so not right about this. Something is terribly unsound about our thinking and methodology and macho gun-totin' kill-'em-all isolationist Texas swaggerin' approach to the world. This is not a war for freedom. This is not a war for the safety of American soil. Bush is marching us straight into a hellish quagmire, and no one seems to be asking why.

This is why I cried through the whole damned movie, P. Seeing it expressed this way has made me cry again. Cut it out, dammit. I'm tired of having puffy eyes.



A lot of us, not enough of us, were more than asking; we were calling Congress and complaining to journalists, and begging others to wake up and demand the truth.

We were drowned out by the voices screaming for their cowboy president to kick some Arab ass, any Arabs, any number of asses, guilty or innocent, as long as he "took action." Now the world is more dangerous for all of us.

For three years I've felt like a passenger in a high-speed car chase with children at the wheel.

I'm exhausted. My faith in democracy is shattered. And that's the least of the things that have been irreparably damaged by the people who criminalized reason and sanity after 9/11 - and the people who let them do it.

 

[Pure]

Sher, I would not despair. The press was not exactly filled with critiques in the early phases of the Vietnam war (not did the older middle class include many war protesters, for several years); that came after TENS of thousands of casualities.

And, on the topic, a bunch of Japanese were imprisoned without redress in WWII (Supreme Court affirmed, iirc). I agree some features are intensified, particularly around detention of US citizens without trial.

According to some analysis I've posted and no one's read, the phase shift begins with Clinton. In any case, once a nation is pre-eminent, unchallenged, it's bound to undertake various hegemonic projects labeled as 'moral' ('mission civilatrice'). Clinton came close to unilateral actions, iirc.

True there's ignorance in the Ov.Off., goat-story reading, hullaballoo, and lots of Texas bluster, but some of these jobs gotta get done. Oh, and there's Jesus talk sprouting everywhere, as one Rep. said, "Mention Jesus to Kerry and his head will burst open."

Compare the present also to Britain, during the Falklands war.

As your post shows, this isn't exactly a Republican 'hijacking' of the government. Equally we may say the Dems have rushed to the right (following the polls), have added voices to the calls for war, victory, etc. ** The Clinton's Methodism was pretty public.

What would change things? Well the pop. would have to undergo some crisis, like the Germans did, after all their baser impulses were nurtured for years. Some bubbles would have to burst, and on the home front, the jobs situation shows a few signs of that (enough to interest CNN, no less). This war, at present is NOT costly enough.

Question for the august readers here: Do you know of anyone (include yourself) who's lost a relative or close friend in the Iraq war?


---
** A judge to Federal District court, Leon Holmes, was just confirmed, with six Dems voting yes: he said that pregnancy after rape was as rare as snowfall in Miami (hence the silliness of thinking about 'rape' issues in drafting the abortion laws.) A couple Republican women (e.g., Snow) voted 'no.'

 

[Pure]

Well, i did finally see the thing, and it has many virtues, if a few 'low shorts.' There are good points about corruption, lies, etc. Also it captures some of the horror of war, though perhaps less than some others.

It was a hot night and no airconditioning in the packed theater, so it seemed quite long. Not sure of the point of the last half hour.

On the down side: 1) Not clear about how Iraq got targetted; 2) Too focused on Bush.

The knave or fool, evil or idiot, question, is not the only one. How about, Is he relevant at all (i.e., calling the shots). It was interesting the claim that Bush Sr. kept a close hand in the CIA through the whole runup to Sept 11.

I did learn something about the turkey Gore. The Black congress persons needed only one senator's signature to make an official protest, and he and his buds weren't gonna volunteer despite their supposed concern with Black voters.

 

[shereads]

I did learn something about the turkey Gore. The Black congress persons needed only one senator's signature to make an official protest, and he and his buds weren't gonna volunteer despite their supposed concern with Black voters.

I hurt for Al Gore when I watched that scene. He had endured the loss of his life's goal even though he had won it, and the press and the Congress had begun to make noises like it was HIS fault the election was still unsettled. He had the grace to back down when the Supreme Court upheld the right of Bush's brother and campaign manager to stop the recount in Florida, and very likely he believed that it would only have been a symbolic gesture and deeply divisive to continue trying to stop the GWB coronation. Having to preside over the end of his own career must have been extraordinarily painful. And yeah, I was ashamed of the entire Senate. Even if would only have prolonged the agony, it was hard to watch, especially here in Florida where I knew the extent of the Republican effort to keep black voters away from the polls. A turkey? Imagine the reaction if Gore had been the one Senator to sign an objection to his opponent's confirmation. He had done nothing wrong exept questioning a highly questionable call, and was already being characterized as a poor loser.

 

[Somme]

A wee bump for somme of lits' best reading...