I’m going to do my own take on Fahrenheit 9/11 over the weekend. In the meantime one reader – Justice Marcus Einfeld sent this short comment in to me.
Fahrenheit 9/11 has flaws but its basic message is powerful testimony to the grave sins which governments the world over are committing against their own and other countries’ peoples. Taken together with the recent fully researched books by Bob Woodward, John Dean and others, and the inquiries of the US Congress, Lords Hutton and Butler in the UK, and Phillip Flood in Australia, our system of government is being revealed as corrupted by a greed for power, wealth and influence little different to those we so strongly criticise in others.
In the process it is purveying, through a cowed, unquestioning even fellow travelling media, a litany of lies and half truths and distorting the great trust which we in democracies place in our leaders.
Everything went wrong over Iraq, they all say, but no one is to blame. We went to war in the wrong country for the wrong reasons and in the process killed or generated the killing of thousands of the very people we were supposed to be trying to protect. But no one needs to answer for it. At least our leaders got the first 3 letters of the relevant country right!!!
Moore’s film shows that we have made remarkably little progress from the propaganda methods employed by much hated earlier regimes of government which made an art form of brainwashing their peoples into accepting as true what was in fact falsehood and prevarication.
Moore himself uses some of the same technique. He thus demonstrates that “terrorism of the mind” by the state and media may be as powerful a weapon against our freedom as the “War on the Abstract Noun” in the cause of which there appear few limits to which those with access to power will go.
would you like to make an argument of your claim or are you just settled with that statement?
Comment by matt byrne — July 30, 2004 @ 6:42 pm
Evil
I’m pretty sure he’s retired from the Bench (thank God).
Comment by Ken Parish — July 30, 2004 @ 8:08 pm
Gee, Evil, you’re not real good with this analogy thing, are you?
Try this: A couple of unreliable witnesses say the criminal has heroin in the house, so the police get a search warrant. The occupant does not resist and they search the house. They don’t find anything. The police chief insists that there is heroin there anyway and attacks the house without a warrant, resulting in much bloodshed. Further searches fails to find heroin and reveal that the witnesses made up the story about the heroin.
Comment by Tim Lambert — August 1, 2004 @ 3:43 pm
Not too clear on this “witness” concept are you, Evil?
A witness would be someone who has actually seen the heroin. But no-one actually had seen it, and the ones who said they had were lying.
Comment by Tim Lambert — August 1, 2004 @ 10:38 pm
Tim & evil both have it wrong. Police would have lawful authority to make a search, even acting on incorrect information. A better analogy would be a viginante mob doing the searching and arresting, after the proper authorities already conducted a search, and failed to find illegal activities.
Comment by Mark — August 2, 2004 @ 8:44 am
That’s right, evil. It’s a wicked world we live in, but the accusers and the accused are guilty of the same kinds of state-sanctioned murder and torture (and the bathroom was clean anyway, as you would expect after 12+ years of surveilance).
Comment by Mark — August 2, 2004 @ 2:11 pm
And another thing Evil. The police in your example have much more than a kilo of heroin of their own. They make it by the tonne, and fund research into making even harder stuff. They themselves are addicted to the stuff. They sell it to friends; a very profitable sideline. But if someone else tries to get their hands on a few grams, they come down on them like a tonne of bricks. Sounds like a corrupt police force to me.
Comment by Mark — August 3, 2004 @ 9:09 am