The Real Problem with Michael Moore

A few days ago I bought a copy of Michael Moore is a Big Fat Stupid White Man, and zipped right through it (it's a quick read). I found the book not quite as funny as it's author's probably wanted it to be, and a bit repetitive at moments. But overall the book is a pretty damning indictment of Moore's habitual fabrications, manipulations, and general mendacity (as well as his habit of claiming artistic license and/or lashing out whenever anyone calls him on this).


Moreover, the book neatly unravels the lynchpin of Fahrenheit 9/11: the charge that Bush is in bed with the Saudis and the Bin Laden family. Moore's only evidence is the fact that the Bushes and the bin Ladens both invested in the Carlyle Group, an international investment firm. So they have their money in the same bank, wooopeee, right? But it turns out that George Soros, billionaire Bush-hater, Democratic fund-raiser, and founder of moveon.org, also invests in Carlyle, and in amounts that dwarf the Bushes and the bin Ladens.


Taking this annoying little fact and running with it, the authors create a conspiracy theory involving Moore, Soros, the Saudis, and Disney (I knew they were evil! I just knew it!) no less plausible than that advanced by Moore in his film. Which is to say, not very plausible at all, in the end.


But all of this is minor stuff, putting the structure underneath the thesis that Moore is a waste of space and his films of the Goebbles school of public debate. That point's been made by better men than I; Lileks, for example, here and here. What Lileks doesn't mention, and what I think far more interesting, is the book's suggestion of, for lack of a better term, an ideological connection between Moore's brand of Leftism and the Islamic Jihadism with which we are at war. The missing link is called Qutbism in the book, and it provides an interesting answer to the by-now-cliched question: "Why Do They Hate Us?"


Because they were taught to do so.


The book points out that the vast majority of jihad leaders are not ignorant camel-jockeys, but educated men, and mostly educated in western schools. This is unsurprising; many of the great leaders of Third World Communism, such as Ho Chi Minh, were also educated in the West, and learned there to hate the West and what it stands for. Now who would it be that teaches them to learn such things? Perhaps Karl Marx, who disdained the freedoms he enjoyed and spent his life devoted to their spiritual undermining? Perhaps lefty academics of the Sartre/Fanon school, who never met a bloodthirsty revolutionary they couldn't cheer for? Perhaps the hip trendies running Colorado State University and Stanford, who educated Sayiid Qutb, Osama's John the Baptist?


Qutb, according to the book, drew heavily on western thought, especially Marx, in divising his writings, which hold, among other things, that America was the land of brutes and sluts, primitive and materialistic and soulless, and deserving of violent distruction.  The West corrupts the Islamic world, so the Islamic world must destroy the West. We deserve whatever is done to us, no matter how foul.


Thus Qutb. Here's Moore:

The Iraqis who have riesen up against the occupation are not "insurgents" or "terrorists" or "The Enemy." They are the REVOLUTION, the Minutemen, and they will win. (comments on President Bush's A13 News Conference, April 16, 2004)

 

What I do is that all day long I have heard everything about this bin Laden guy except his one fact--WE created the monster known as bin Laden. (Moore's Sept. 12, 2001 letter, on his website)

 

We, the United States of America, are culpable in committing so many acts of terror and bloodshed that we had better get a clue about the culture of violence in which we have been active participants. (from "Somwhere in the Land of Enchantment" on his website, September 15, 2001)

Add to that the core theme of Bowling for Columbine -- we are an aggressive, excessively materialistic and dangerous culture that erodes the individual soul -- and you have the basic set of beliefs that animates jihadis.


I should point out that none of this is to imply that a) criticizing Western culture or b) criticizing the War on Terror automatically puts you in bed with Osama. It is the form and content of your criticism that matters. And if you're going to accept the Michael Moore view of reality, you should know whose views you're sharing.


 Because our enemies have no difficulty with this. Qiadar Faisal, lawyer for Imam Samudra, the leader of the conspiracy behind the October 2002 Bali Bombings, quoted from Moore's book Stupid White Men when presenting the defense summation at Samudra's trial.