I am not gonna blog anything else today. You HAVE TO read Unfairenheit 9/11 - The lies of Michael Moore. By Christopher Hitchens in Slate. Start to finish.
Hitch is so great that European lefties now hate him. I was reading his "Blood, Class, and Empire" re-release last time I was in the UK, and a dinner companion asked "What has gone wrong with Christopher Hitchens?" Yes, the man suddenly thinks religious fascists are almost as dangerous as Henry Kissinger! What's up with that?
Anyway, enjoy his take on Michael Moore today -- I know I did:
To describe this film as dishonest and demagogic would almost be to promote those terms to the level of respectability. To describe this film as a piece of crap would be to run the risk of a discourse that would never again rise above the excremental. To describe it as an exercise in facile crowd-pleasing would be too obvious. Fahrenheit 9/11 is a sinister exercise in moral frivolity, crudely disguised as an exercise in seriousness. It is also a spectacle of abject political cowardice masking itself as a demonstration of "dissenting" bravery.
As someone who has eagerly sought out the works of both Moore and Hitchens, I have to say: "Something has gone wrong with Christopher Hitchens."
His criticism of F9/11 seems so petty, so nasty that you wonder if he caught Moore sleeping with his wife. Er... nah. Not likely.
More likely is that Hitchens supported going to war in Iraq back in 2002 because he hated Saddam and had Kurdish friends. I was on his side at that time. Now I realize that Bush has botched it. And talk about "religious fascists"! Ashcroft? Yup.
Hitchens now writes exactly what the right wants to hear. I have a hard time believing he is in his right mind or is being honest. He needs a long rest in detox with psychological counseling.
Posted by: doryo at June 28, 2004 10:26 PMdoryo,
Thanks for the comment. I think you represent a different view than we see around here.
I really appreciate Hitchens because I think he says an important thing: that the left should be even more afraid of Islamic Fascists, because so many of the topics they hold dear (gay rights, women's rights, equality) are under attack from the regimes where these guys wield substantive influence.
I cannot join you in comparing John Ashcroft to our nation's enemies. I know he is the bete noir of the left. But you cannot equate his policies, even if you don't like them, to the Taliban. Like Bush=Hitler that just doesn't hold up to serious inspection.