Michael Moore’s new movie, “Fahrenheit 11/9,” is out. Sympathetic reviewers say it is “terrifying,” “inspiring,” etc. At Salon, Sophia McClennen suggests that Moore’s true brilliance is in discerning that voters only chose President Trump because we are too stupid to realize that socialism is the only ideological framework that can save us. Or something.
But I actually don’t really want to spend much time on Moore’s movie per se. Like his other productions you can bet it will be a potpourri of half-truths and Alex Jones-style conspiracy theories tempered by Moore’s more solemn voice.
Instead, I want to focus on how one man once perfectly annihilated Moore’s defining cynicism. At the 2004 Republican National Convention, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., spoke of Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11,” a movie riddled with deception and defined by its untrammeled hatred for then-President George W. Bush. He lasered in on the movie’s most absurd moment: its coverage of civilian life in Iraq prior to the start of the U.S.-led invasion in 2003. Attempting to portray Saddam Hussein’s Iraq as a peaceful citadel, Moore uses video of children playing happily with kites and riding down slides.
Now while the Iraq War may not have been the right strategic decision, and certainly has caused immense instability across the Middle East, Moore’s presentation of this happiness was as foul a lie as a filmmaker has ever presented (at least since Leni Riefenstahl). Because whatever the necessary debate over Hussein’s threat capability and strategic intent, there is absolutely no doubt that his late period of rule was defined by intense dystopian suffering: hundreds of thousands of political prisoners, ethnic and religious minorities, and random Iraqis thrown into gulags and then murdered; teenage girls plucked from the street by Hussein’s psychotic son, Uday, then raped and murdered; absolute tyranny imposed at the barrel of a gun.
McCain said as much. Calling the convention to its feet, he noted war’s horror but explained that American deliberations over the Iraq War should not rest on “a disingenuous filmmaker who would have us believe that Saddam’s Iraq was an oasis of peace. When in fact it was a place of indescribable cruelty, torture chambers, mass graves, and prisons that destroyed the lives of the small children inside their walls.”
I remember watching that speech from London, and I was proud of McCain as he annihilated Moore’s lies. He was a great man. Always.
