I'd appreciate if you can calmly debate Fahrenheit 9/11 with me without resorting to a personal attack like "You've gone totally around the bend. Is it the ceaseless demands of doing a blog?"
Let me repeat a question: is there any Saudi in Fahrenheit 9/11 other than Osama bin Laden, the Saudi members of the 9/11 terrorists, the other bin Ladens, some unnamed power-elite Saudis shaking hands with the Bushes, Saudi executioners, one of whom beheads a man, a beheaded man, other prisoners who are about to be beheaded, and Prince Bandar?
Fahrenheit 9/11 explicitly refers to the Saudis -- "Michael Moore: So I read where like the Saudis have a trillion dollars in our banks of their money. What would happen if like one day they just pulled that trillion dollars out?" -- without saying or showing anything that points to contending classes, different political opinions, etc. among the Saudis, as if all Saudis were rich, powerful, and sinister (the only possible exception is an image of a beheaded man and his fellow prisoners, but we are not sure if they are Saudis or foreigners).
The way Fahrenheit 9/11 talks about the Saudis reminds me of the way many Americans -- including some American liberals and leftists -- talked about the Japanese before the plague of deflation.
Anti-Semitism typically has the following structure:
Banks, corporations, economy, etc. get divided into "ours" and "theirs," not on the basis of classes, but on the basis of races/nations: e.g., "Director X: So I read where like the Jews have a trillion dollars in our banks of their money. What would happen if like one day they just pulled that trillion dollars out?" It builds an illusory identity of interests between classes -- "our banks" -- as if the working class in the United States owned US banks.
Then, an image of the powerful alien few who, using "their money," actually or potentially control "our" banks, "our" corporations, "our" economy gets conjured up -- again, not on the basis of class but on the basis of race/nation.
It used to be "the Jews" who mainly occupy the position of "the powerful alien few who control us" -- hence anti-Semitism. As anti-Jewish hatred declined in the United States after World War 2, other nations began to be cast in the position of "the powerful alien few who control us" in political discourse that has the same ideological structure as anti-Semitism but does not target "the Jews." In the 1970s, it was "the Arabs," due to the OPEC oil embargo. In the 1980s, it was "the Japanese." Now, it is "the Saudis." In the near future, it may be "the Chinese," if the robust economic growth of Chinese economy continues uninterrupted for some time.
Perhaps, you don't recognize this problem because we don't have any widely accepted term like anti-Semitism to refer to it.
>I still don't get why you're defending Saudi Arabia.
That's a straw man. I've already put down my own two cents about Saudi Arabia in my prior posting here <http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/pipermail/lbo-talk/Week-of-Mon-20040705/014908.html>:
Saudi Arabia, as well as Kuwait, is a pure product of colonialism that should never have been created. And yet, there is no time machine that would allow us to undo its creation, and, as Fahim reminds us, there is no easy way to untie the unhappy Saudi-American knot. As long as Washington, be it under the Republican or Democratic White House, is committed to keeping its status as empire, running on deficits to police the capitalist world order fueled by oil, it is probably impossible for it to change its foreign policy -- especially its contradictory policies on Israel and Saudi Arabia -- without wreaking havoc on the world.
Do you disagree? If so, why?
>Would you apply the same critique to Tariq Ali, who's pretty hard on
>them in this 2001 interview with me
><http://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/Ali.html>?
Tariq Ali speaks of the conflict between the ruling and middle classes in Saudi Arabia: "In Saudi Arabia -- a repressive religious state where people are denied any secular openings at all -- the opposition comes from people who speak in the name of a purer version of the same religion, and denounce the monarchy as hypocritical, in the pocket of the Great Satan. And that, in my opinion, is the cause of middle-class discontent, of their turning against their rulers and towards action of the most diabolical sort." Do you get the same sense of class conflict within Saudi Arabia from Fahrenheit 9/11? Ali also speaks of the Saudi middle class's resentment against the Western double standard toward Israel on one hand and Iraq and Palestine on the other hand -- the question completely missing from Fahrenheit 9/11.
>[lbo-talk] Yoshie and the Double Standard
>martin mschiller at pobox.com
>Sun Jul 11 12:22:07 PDT 2004
<snip>
>More than 'fascinating', this is an effective work of art that
>communicates with it's intended audience. To judge a work of art by
>the standards employed in the criticism of political rhetoric seems
>to be employing another double standard - a critical violation.
>
>Martin
I doubt that Michael Moore denies that Fahrenheit 9/11, as well as all his works, is political as well as artistic. Some works of art have no explicit political rhetoric built into them, but Moore's works are not among them, and he, as well as his audience, knows that. -- Yoshie
* Critical Montages: <http://montages.blogspot.com/> * Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/> * Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>