Archive for March, 2003
Protected: Saddam Tried to Kill My Dad & Mike Moore
Posted in Uncategorized on March 31, 2003|
Saddam Tried to Kill My Dad & Mike Moore
Posted in Uncategorized on March 31, 2003| Leave a Comment »
Why I made that speech
March 31 2003
Something had to be said at the Oscars about the war. Michael Moore explains why he was the one to say it.
A word of advice to future Oscar winners: don’t begin Oscar day by going to church. That is where I found myself last Sunday morning, at the Church of the Good Shepherd on Santa Monica Boulevard, at Mass with my sister and my dad. My problem with the Catholic Mass is that sometimes I find my mind wandering after I hear something the priest says, and I start thinking all these crazy thoughts like how it is wrong to kill people and that you are not allowed to use violence upon another human being unless it is in true self-defence.
The Pope even came right out and said it: this war in Iraq is not a just war and, thus, it is a sin.
Those thoughts were with me the rest of the day. I had not planned on winning an Academy Award for Bowling for Columbine (no documentary that was a big box-office success had won since Woodstock), and so I had no speech prepared. Besides, I had already received awards in the days leading up to the Oscars and used the same acceptance remarks. I spoke of the need for non-fiction films when we live in such fictitious times. We have a fictitious US President who was elected with fictitious election results. He is now conducting a war for a fictitious reason (the claim that Saddam Hussein has stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction when in fact we are there to get the world’s second-largest supply of oil).
We are continually bombarded with one fictitious story after another from the Bush White House. And that is why it is important that filmmakers make non-fiction, so that all the little lies can be exposed and the public informed. An uninformed public in a democracy is a sure-fire way to end up with little or no democracy at all.
That is what I have been saying for some time. Millions of Americans seem to agree. My book Stupid White Men still sits at No. 1 on the US bestseller list. Bowling for Columbine has broken all box-office records for a documentary. My website is now getting up to 20 million hits a day (more than the White House’s site).
My opinions about the state of the United States are neither unknown nor on the fringe, but rather they exist with mainstream majority opinion. The majority of Americans, according to polls, did not want to go into this war without the backing of the United Nations and all of America’s allies.
That is where the US is at. It’s liberal, it’s for peace and it is only tacitly in support of its leader because that is what you are supposed to do when you are at war and you want your kids to come back from Iraq alive.
In the commercial break before the best documentary Oscar was to be announced, I suddenly thought that maybe this community of film people was also part of that American majority and just might have voted for my film. I leaned over to my fellow nominees and told them that, should I win, I was going to say something about President Bush and the war and would they like to join me up on the stage? They all agreed.
Moments later, Diane Lane opened the envelope and announced the winner: Bowling for Columbine. The entire main floor rose to its feet for a standing ovation. I was immeasurably moved and humbled as I motioned for the other nominees to join my wife (the film’s producer) and me up on the stage.
I then said what I had been saying all week at those other awards ceremonies. I guess a few other people had heard me say those things too because before I had finished my first sentence about the fictitious president, a couple of men (some reported it was “stagehands” just to the left of me) near a microphone started some loud yelling. Then a group in the upper balcony joined in. What was so confusing to me, as I continued my remarks, was that I could hear this noise but, looking out on the main floor, I didn’t see a single person booing.
But then the majority in the balcony – who were in support of my remarks – started booing the booers. It all turned into one humungous cacophony of yells and cheers and jeers. And all I’m thinking is, “Hey, I put on a tux for this?”
I tried to get out my last line (“Any time you’ve got both the Pope and the Dixie Chicks against you, you’re not long for the White House”) and the orchestra struck up its tune to end the melee. (A few orchestra members came up to me later and apologised, saying they had wanted to hear what I had to say.) I had gone 55 seconds, 10 more than allowed.
Was it appropriate? To me, the inappropriate thing would have been to say nothing at all or to thank my agent, my lawyer and the designer who dressed me. I made a movie about the American desire to use violence both at home and around the world. My remarks were in keeping with exactly what my film was about. If I had a movie about birds or insects, I would have talked about birds or insects. I made a movie about guns and Americans’ tradition of using them against the world and each other.
And, as I walked up to the stage, I was still thinking about the lessons that morning at Mass. About how silence, when you observe wrongs being committed, is the same as committing those wrongs yourself. And so I followed my conscience and my heart.
On the way back home, the day after the Oscars, two flight attendants told me how they had been stuck overnight in my home state – and wound up earning only $30 for the day because they are paid by the hour.
They said they were telling me this in the hope that I would tell others. Because they, and the millions like them, have no voice. They don’t get to be commentators on cable news like the bevy of retired generals we’ve been watching all week. (Can we please demand that the US military remove its troops from ABC/CBS/NBC/CNN/MSNBC/Fox?) They don’t get to make movies or talk to a billion people on Oscar night. They are the American majority who are being asked to send their sons and daughters over to Iraq to possibly die so Bush’s buddies can have the oil.
Who will speak for them if I don’t? That’s what I do, or try to do, every day of my life, and March 23, 2003 – though it was one of the greatest days of my life and an honour I will long cherish – was no different.
Except I made the mistake of beginning it in a church.
Michael Moore won an Academy Award for Bowling for Columbine. This article first appeared in the Los Angeles Times.
Protected: Rise of the Chemical Soldier
Posted in Uncategorized on March 30, 2003|
Rise of the Chemical Soldier
Posted in Uncategorized on March 30, 2003| Leave a Comment »
I listened to this radio program about the use of experimental drugs on serviceman in combat-
The Rise of the Chemical Soldier
The Vietnam War was played out in front of the television cameras and for the first time we saw the horrors of combat every night from the safety of our lounge rooms. The enduring legacy for our military at that time is Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome. What if soldiers could pop a pill and erase all guilt and remorse? And why, despite being banned in 1992, are American Airforce Pilots still taking speed before flying? Is this the age of a chemically enhanced soldier? Sue Clark reports.
If you want to listen to the show go to this site –
Protected: Enneagram Test Burgled from LDR and Amusing ’40s Propaganda Posters with a Twist
Posted in Uncategorized on March 30, 2003|
Enneagram Test Burgled from LDR and Amusing ’40s Propaganda Posters with a Twist
Posted in Uncategorized on March 30, 2003| Leave a Comment »
Am not sure this is accurate but who is to know –
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Conscious self
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Overall self
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And some more amusing images that I found on this great site which reworks 1940s Propaganda Posters into current parlance, with a twist.
This one is really good –
Here are a few others –
Protected: My readings and cartoons and pictures I enjoyed
Posted in Uncategorized on March 30, 2003|
My readings and cartoons and pictures I enjoyed
Posted in Uncategorized on March 30, 2003| Leave a Comment »
I liked this article printed in yesterday’s paper written by British playwright, David Hare –
Not quite according to the script
March 29 2003
The concern about whether the Oscars ceremony was offensive at a time of war reflects a more profound unease in American society, writes British playwright David Hare.
It has been one of the least attractive features of the past few weeks that Europeans have been encouraged in the illusion that they are considering the implications of the current invasion of Iraq more seriously than citizens in America.
When the Los Angeles Times Book Review recently announced a debate about the war in a downtown 1800-seat theatre, it was sold out within hours. The resulting arguments achieved a level of deep knowledge and sophistication that has not been matched, at least to my ears, in any public forum in Britain.
For anyone like me who has spent a good deal of the past month travelling across America, the intensity of national divisions has been something of a revelation. Because we often depend for our view of America on vacuous news programs produced by cowed and grovelling networks that have become an embarrassment to the serious profession of journalism, we are presented with a parody of a country that is falling dutifully in behind its warmongering president. In fact, 1000 protesters were arrested in San Francisco in one march – the greatest number on any public subject in the past 20 years.
The weight of opinion, at least on the surface, may indeed be differently balanced on the American continent than it is in Europe and Asia. But time spent talking on the streets, in bars and in private houses leaves you with the impression of a population that knows, at every level, just how radical and incendiary the philosophy of the pre-emptive strike will, in the long term, prove.
People are not at ease. They know as well as any foreigner that regime change in Iraq has nothing to do with September 11, and they bitterly resent the insult to their intelligence implicit in the words of politicians who try, and fail, to make the link.
Even those who support Bush in his aims are appalled by his methods. The swaggering pleasure in proclaiming the irrelevance of international organisations seems, at the very least, unnecessary and unwise, a certain means of storing up big-time trouble for the day when America tries to move back towards more collaborative aims.
If, in Donald Rumsfeld’s chilling words, “The mission defines the coalition, and not the coalition the mission”, then what meaning does friendship have? The careless pursuit of what we may remember as the Fawn Hall doctrine (“Sometimes you have to go above the written law”) is not making anyone happy. The true anti-Americanism is that of leaders who pretend that electors can be bullied into a new and dangerous foreign policy without even stopping to think.
In all this, of course, it suited everybody’s purposes to direct attention from the doubtful legitimacy of the invasion itself to the question of whether it was tasteful to proceed with a shameless and self-advertising Oscar ceremony. Would there not be something offensive about actors disporting themselves on red carpets at the very moment when Bush had begun to plump up the 20,000 body bags that he has ordered?
Underlying the question is an interesting ambivalence. No country has done more to propagate and render ubiquitous what is known as celebrity culture. But like drunks waking in the gutter and resolving not to drink again, American commentators are suddenly eager to declare that the highest-rung rite of celebrity – which their own media have lovingly created, and which the advertisers have made hugely profitable – should be cancelled as being no longer appropriate to the new dispensation.
As someone who was caught up by chance in this year’s oddly timed festivities – I wrote the screenplay of The Hours – it has been bewildering to see how quickly opinions changed and then just as quickly changed back again. Uncertainty about how to proceed with the Oscars was, on some small scale, a reflection of how hard it is to think lucidly about the war.
When producer Harvey Weinstein announced that “the show must go on, but with more discretion than before”, we knew he was talking nonsense.
But the interesting thing is what kind of nonsense it was. It is as if a good many Americans were still not actually quite sure what expressions they ought to be wearing at a time when their troops are engaging in such a brutally uneven encounter, and for purposes that remain, after nine months of ineffective propaganda, substantially in doubt.
If we were really at war, really at risk in an action that the people of both Britain and America truly believed in, then the question of how to behave in public would resolve itself effortlessly. Need, heroism and grief would take over unforced from trouble, confusion and bad conscience.
When the Administration’s media spaniels attack Hollywood for its selfishness and excess, what they are really doing is struggling to reassert control of the narrative. Don de Lillo argues in his novel Underworld that, every 10 years, politicians deliberately stage an international crisis in order to remind the world that it is they who are in charge of mankind’s destiny.
These events, such as the Cuban missile crisis or the Falklands War, are, essentially, acts of ownership, staged by a hyper-professional political class to bring home to ordinary people an overwhelming sense of their own powerlessness.
Washington resents Hollywood not because Hollywood has any real power, but because politicians see all too clearly in the sometimes cringe-making doubts and hesitations of actors and filmmakers the very same doubts and hesitations that they know are haunting whole sections of society.
Underneath the politicians’ hostility to the manufacturers of fiction is the alarming possibility that mere actors, gathered together for a hapless gong show, may, in their repeated willingness to allude, however incoherently, to the wellspring of their own craft, be closer to the everyday feelings of the general public than the politicians are themselves.
People who enjoy the idle pleasure of getting worked up about actors exploiting their celebrity to express political views should remember George Bernard Shaw, who knew the exact currency of his own profession: “I shall never have any real influence, because I have never killed anybody and don’t want to.”
By Shaw’s salutary yardstick the truly influential people of our time remain who they have always been: Pinochet, Kissinger, Saddam Hussein and Milosevic. Not Martin Sheen, for goodness’ sake. Nor Susan Sarandon.
Telegraph, London
And one of our local commentators responds to the criticism of anti-war protestors here at home by some of the Veterans organisations and the military hierarchy and the government. I admit the violence at the “Books Not Bombs” rally on Wednesday was stupid and played into the war-mongers’ hands, giving them an opening to criticise all anti-war protestors as anti-social, violent thugs. It also gave the police an excuse to ban all street protests. Though what was worrying me was that prior to last Wednesday’s riot at the rally the police were saying that they were worried about violence before the event. It makes you wonder if they were determined through their tactics in crowd-control to make it a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Protest is not only right, it is a right
March 30 2003
By Terry Lane
Major-General Alan Stretton is one of many voices raised in the past week to tell anti-war demonstrators to pull their heads in and cheer for our boys and girls doing their duty in Mesopotamia.
The very model of a modern major-general says that now the war is on “we must all support our Prime Minister when he says that the Defence Force had no say in the decision and should not be blamed for doing their duty”.
In other words, now that the army is in Iraq, we have no choice but to cheer them on. Really?
Another line of criticism of anti-war protesters is emerging: Things are going well and Saddam is a really bad man, so let’s just get on with it and stop picking the nits. Who knows, in the end the people of Iraq may cheer the liberators.
True. The ones who are still alive, that is.
Of the millions of people who have taken to the streets to oppose the war, not many are doing it to save Saddam’s skin. They are on the streets to say that we have no right to send an army to kill Iraqis, either military or civilian, just because they have a bad government.
Anti-war dissent, the major-general and his ilk say, is not legitimate because we do not know all the facts, nor do we have all the answers for what should happen when the war is over, so we should shut up and stay indoors. The war lovers who support the Federal Government, on the other hand, have the right to hold and express opinions on the war.
This is preposterous arrogance and characteristic of the supporters of the war. I have never heard a dissenter suggest that the war lovers have no right to have their say, even though we think they are defective in logic, morality, legality and knowledge.
What does the major-general know that gives him a special prerogative to speak on the matter and at the same time tell all those with whom he disagrees to shut up?
My guess is that what the average anti-war protester wants is for every Australian gun to jam in the dust; every tank grind to a halt with sand in its gears; every aeroplane to be grounded by a great haboob, so that they can neither kill nor be killed. We want them to come to their senses and say to themselves: “No Iraqi has killed any Australian. What are we doing here? Just because an Iraqi wears a uniform does not make him my legitimate target. Young Iraqi men and women have the same right as I do to live to a ripe old age, making love, bearing children and doting on their grandchildren. Let’s stop this madness and go home.”
That’s the sentimental hope. But we also hope that, on a more hard-headed level, it may occur to some thoughtful soldiers that doing their duty or obeying an order is no excuse for committing a crime.
George and John’s great adventure is not war as it is normally understood. It is murder. “Shock and awe” is a sickening euphemism for unrestrained slaughter.
Consider this. The appalling Bush used the UN to disarm Iraq. Then, when the job was done, he was ready to go to war against a defenceless nation and the UN refused to take the next step. So, having got what he wanted from the world body, he went ahead, with his two pipsqueak pals, and started a war anyway. It is right for good people to take to the streets to say of this shameful and criminal action, “Not in my name!”
By the way, “BHP (is) ready for oil industry invasion of Iraq after the war”, according to the Business Age on Tuesday. At least we can rely on the organs of capitalism to tell us the truth.
Reason Swamped by Mindless Patriotism
Another local commentator on the failure of the war to run to the expected script. That people talk of war like it is a movie plot and the whole exercise is being organised for public display is somewhat disturbing.
War instead of awards
March 30 2003
By Ray Cassin
Do you support our troops in Iraq? It seems like a straightforward question, to which a reply like “Yes, I believe they shouldn’t have been sent there so I hope they’re brought home soon” ought to be perfectly acceptable. But bringing the troops home is not the sort of support for them that people who ask the question typically have in mind. They want the person they’re interrogating to give a commitment to refrain from criticising the war, lest the men and women of the ADF be demoralised by the knowledge that not all of their compatriots think they are fighting in a just cause. On this view, opposing a war in which our troops are involved amounts to disloyalty to Australia.
It is a widely held view, but an extremely odd one given the aims for which the war is avowedly being fought. George Bush and John Howard like to tell us that this war is being fought to liberate the people of Iraq from a tyrant; yet supporters of the war are suggesting that the army of democracy can only function if democracy is put on hold at home and no one criticises the war. Allied to this view is the only slightly less odd, but equally widespread, view that bipartisan support should exist before Australia undertakes any foreign military adventure. Bipartisanship undermines democracy because it declares certain questions to be beyond the realm of debate.
The notion that certain questions are too important to be debated, and that some sort of feigned or manufactured consensus should prevail on them, is a convenient one for governments that have committed the nation to war, but it is nonsense. It also shows no real concern for our soldiers, for it continues the age-old notion of soldiers as mere pawns in the hands of rulers. Soldiers must do their duty, it is true, and that may require them to make great sacrifices. But they are not pawns, they are human beings and our fellow citizens, which is why the sacrifices they may be called on to make should matter greatly to us and are worth arguing about. No one should be asked to sacrifice his or her life in a war of aggression, waged against an already defeated country, at the behest of a powerful ally intent upon reshaping the world for its own purposes.
The desire to treat soldiers – ours and those they are fighting against – as pawns is at the root of the surprise that is evident in some of the reactions to this war. There was a script for the war, conceived by politicians and strategists in Washington and handed down to other politicians and strategists in Canberra and London. According to the script, the war would be over quickly, certainly in a matter of weeks and perhaps even within days, because once the invasion of Iraq had begun there would be little serious resistance and the regime would collapse. Yet the war has not run according to the script.
Some Iraqi military units have surrendered en masse, but many have not. And, even in the Shiite south of the country, the advancing coalition forces have not always been received as liberators by the civilian population. The reception is often sullen, and sometimes defiant. Fedayeen militias have appeared and are harrying the long supply lines of the coalition, while in Baghdad people are preparing for a long siege. Perplexed coalition commanders such asLieutenant-General William Wallace, the US Army commander in the Gulf, are trying to make sense of it all. “The enemy we’re fighting,” he declared, “is a bit different than the one we war-gamed against.”
He did not only mean that his troops are fighting paramilitary forces. He meant these forces are fighting with a resolve that isn’t in the script. One incident in particular left him almost speechless. In the battle for Najaf, a town south of Baghdad on the Euphrates, Iraqi soldiers in utility trucks with machine-guns mounted on them had charged US tanks and other armoured vehicles. And the general’s word for an action that was brave to the point of being foolhardy? “Bizarre.”
If he had been describing the Polish cavalry who famously charged German tanks in 1939, I doubt that he would have said their action was bizarre, though it was just as suicidal as the charge of the Iraqis in their utes. He would have said that it was insanely brave or foolhardy. That’s what you say about soldiers who are fighting in the cause of right. It’s not what you’re allowed to say about soldiers who, according to the script, are pawns in the hands of a tyrant.
Some supporters of the war, such as The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, have seen more clearly than General Wallace. Might the resistance perhaps be explained, Friedman conjectured, because “even Iraqis who detest Saddam love their homeland and these Iraqis are ready to resist a foreign occupier, even one that claims to be a liberator?” Now why didn’t the writers of the script think of that? What reason would ordinary Iraqis, whatever they think of the Baathist regime, have to trust the US promises about the future of their country?
Even Friedman, however, could not completely avoid portraying the resisters as pawns. “It is not at all unusual for Arabs to detest both their own dictator and a foreign occupier,” he loftily explained. It is not unusual for Arabs? It is not unusual for most peoples, surely. There is an implicit racism in Friedman’s choice of words, which portrays Arabs not as human beings but as some sort of exotic species.
If a commentator with his liberal instincts cannot escape that sort of racism, there is little reason to expect that the eventual US occupiers of Iraq will do so either.
Ray Cassin is a staff writer.
Email: rcassin@theage.com.au
And I liked this little slice of life piece reflecting on the unexpected stresses and strains experienced by people in these dark days and how they react to an incident at a railway station and the songs of a busker on the train –
Living with war’s stresses and trains
March 30 2003
By John Elder
Spencer Street Station, the evening rush hour and the war a week old: after coming down the ramp and turning right toward the ticket gates, you pass a little cafe on your left-hand side. At the mouth of the cafe are two Connex ticket inspectors, their uniform jackets billowing like matador capes as they make wide arcing motions with their arms.
One of them – “Gerry”, according to his name badge – keeps saying, over and over, “Walk around please, sir. Walk around please, madam.”
And so the running creek of commuters makes a wide arc around the cafe, with a vague quickening in their steps.
Now and then someone stops to ask “what’s going on?” or “what’s happened?” or, with greater urgency, “what’s that beeping noise?”
The beeping noise is coming from the cafe’s litter bin – and has been for about 20 minutes. Instead of the police or fire brigade coming to the scene, Gerry’s been roped in to check it out.
Gerry doesn’t want people freaking out. He doesn’t have the authority to close the station. All he can do is wave his arms and calmly insist: “Please. Just keep moving.”
Further along, at the ticketing machines, you hear people casually speculating about a bomb being found in the cafe. It passes around like a piece of hot gossip more than a matter of concern, let alone panic.
From a dozen steps away, you can suddenly hear Gerry say: “I think it’s OK. There’s no wires coming out of it.”
Now an off-duty policeman comes by, checks out the noisy parcel in the bin, moves on to catch his train.
Soon after, Gerry has it in his hands, a white pastic shopping bag tied up with a double knot. His partner is still on the phone, trying to get the station master involved. Gerry opens the bag, takes out a small clock, an old-fashioned round face and two hands set in a white wooden frame. The alarm is set for six o’clock. Set on the clock’s frame is a little pink fairy. It’s brand-new, too. On the back is the price sticker: $9.99.
Gerry doesn’t have much to say now. The creek of commuters is running in a straight line again. He gets lost among them, clock in hand. He wants to surrender it to somebody in authority.
By the time you reach the station platform, at about 6.40pm, the bomb rumour has become an old joke. Nobody’s shaken, nobody’s stirred. There are no real theories going around beyond the clock being a prank of small imagination. Nobody mentions the war – relative to the clock or otherwise.
Changing at Richmond, for the Sandringham line, you find a man carrying a guitar with three plastic flowers sticking from the tuning keys. When he boards the train he asks if anyone minds him playing a few songs. They’re pretty songs about love and longing and one of them has a line about “smouldering cities”. He has a nice voice. Thankfully not strident or overblown with earnest emotion.
It’s mostly the women on the train who smile at his banter, his plaintive melodies. One or two men turn their heads when he sings something particularly sad. By the time the train reaches Windsor, something breaks. One of the women who seemed so cheered by the balladeer suddenly wears the wet, red face of a grief she doesn’t name.
Will There Will be Democracy for Those that Survive?
Posted in Uncategorized on March 29, 2003| Leave a Comment »
Will There Will be Democracy for Those that Survive?
Posted in Uncategorized on March 29, 2003| Leave a Comment »
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