Fahrenheit 911
04 Jul 2004
"We live in fictitious times, where we have ficticious election results that elect a fictitious president. We live in a time where we have a man sending us to war for fictitious reasons."
Michael Moore strikes a deep seated frustration in the American psyche these days. One that screams against injustice, inequity and old boy networks that send poor people off to a questionably motivated war.
At this point, it goes without saying that there were no weapons of mass destruction. The UN was right and those that opposed the "Coalition of the Willing" were totally justified. And it's obvious that the media was fed what the White house wanted it to hear, and used patriotic flag waving to keep everyone in line and pass widely sweeping reductions to civil liberties and increased police powers. I don't think Moore went too far in quoting the line from Orwell's 1984 about the point of war simply being perpetual.
While a good deal of the film is a good deal of Dude, Where's My Country ? put to screen, I found it so much harder to watch than the book. The visceral nature of the tragedy, the war footage, the anguish of people losing soldiers and relatives in a war that may have had not one iota of justifiable premise has actually given me a bit of a headache it is so emotionally upsetting.
I mean, we've all known for years about the revolving door between Beltway government and large corporations that need access to political influence, but the connections here are beyond frightening. Halliburton, Unocol, the Carlyle Group and the Saudi connections are a little too slippy.
The idea that the entire tragedy that was 9/11 was subverted to make it easier to wage a war on Iraq seems like the ultimate perversion of political power. The worst is the idea that this was all done to wage a private war and make money for corporate hacks. And people are dying. On both sides.
This is not an objective film. But when you think about it, it is no worse than the type of propaganda that we've been subjected to over the last few years to sell a phony war in Afghanistan and an even more baseless war in Iraq.
Regardless of which side of the fight about the war you are on, you should go see the film. The lack of dialogue and farcical excuses for suppressing dialogue on these issues, rampant civil right violations and the contin
The lack of discussion surrounding the war up to this point needs to changa and even if this film does nothing more than increasing the dialogue amongst conservatives about why this war was waged it is critical