There is a slight difference between the liberal attack and the left attack; the liberals attack him to boost their personal respectability, the leftists to boost their personal radical cred. But the pathology is the same: suspicion of any popular left phenomena. If the people are listening, the message must not be worth hearing. How are we supposed to change anything if we think that way?
-- Liza
> From: Chris Doss <lookoverhere1 at yahoo.com>
> Reply-To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
> Date: Tue, 13 Jul 2004 07:51:36 -0700 (PDT)
> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
> Subject: [lbo-talk] Americas Vichy Left vs. Michael Moore
>
> Backstabbers!
>
> America?s Vichy Left vs. Michael Moore
> By Mark Ames ( editor at exile.ru )
>
> (snip)
>
> This is roughly the same wretched story of the
> American Left ever since Reagan quashed it. For years
> now, America's Leftists have been flogging themselves
> to death wondering why it is that they remain so weak
> and disenfranchised. Most Leftists agree that it's all
> the fault of the right-wing dominated media, and the
> Republican-infested corporate conglomerates that
> control the major media outlets. Others blame
> religion, or advertising, or popular culture, or
> something inherently base within the genus americanus.
> Sometimes they even blame themselves, though only in a
> safe, disingenuous, fake-self-loathing way: we're
> out-of-touch, too serious, too high-fallutin', we need
> to get with the times, etc.
>
> In fact, the main cause for the demise of the American
> Left is much more sinister than that. The American
> Left is responsible for destroying the American Left.
> I don't mean that metaphorically. I mean quite
> literally that anytime the Left starts to get
> somewhere, you can be sure that a vigilante mob of
> other Leftists will rise to the occasion to crush it,
> to make sure they stay as marginalized and ineffective
> as always. It's a kind of ghetto envy endemic to the
> Left - the Right is always rooting for its heroes to
> succeed. Not the Left. The key for them is to sound
> Virtuous - and oftentimes that means eating their own
> in order to promote themselves.
>
> Nowhere is this more clear than in the American Left's
> envy-fueled lynching of Michael Moore, the only
> Leftist to make it out of the ghetto. I cannot think
> of a single American Leftist in my lifetime as
> effective as Michael Moore, and if Fahrenheit 9/11 is
> objectively anything at all, it is objectively
> effective. Bravery is fairly cheap on the Left
> exchange -- you have to be brave to be Left in this
> Reptilian Age -- but to actually get out of the Left's
> ghetto, into the debate, and to strike and strike
> hard...only one managed that, without going soft or
> becoming "balanced" and "realistic."
>
> (snip)
>
> He has single-handedly managed to turn the Right-Wing
> brutocracy into a pack of whiny fags scrambling to get
> out of the way of the message that his movie
> Fahrenheit 9/11 brings, lest it smack them with such a
> powerful dose of cognitive dissonance that their
> skulls will burst wide open like that guy in Scanners.
> They're so frightened that even the "intellectuals"
> among the Right have been forced to publicly admit
> that the only defense against him is to run into the
> basement, lock the doors, shut off the lights and
> pray, as revealed in National Review editor Jonah
> Goldberg's recent column: "I haven't seen Fahrenheit
> 9/11 and I have no intention to. So, if you want to
> make one of those pious declarations about how you
> can't judge the movie unless you've seen it, be my
> guest... I don't need to know very much about you or
> your ideas to know that if you think Michael Moore is
> just great, a truth-teller and a much-needed tonic for
> everything that is wrong in American life, you are not
> someone to take seriously about anything of political
> consequence, or you are French."
>
> Oo, that's a zinger! "French"! That's some co'd shit,
> nigga! Damn! Even Robert Furs wouldn't go that low!
>
> Ah, what a joy to see the Right behaving so shamefully
> lame. In fact the Right has been so thoroughly
> pimp-slapped that they've been forced to turn to a
> sweaty fair-weather neo-con Brit named Christopher
> Hitchens to protect their little bubbles from
> bursting. Hitchens' critique of Fahrenheit 9/11 still
> stands as the only half-way effective antidote to
> Moore's movie. When the Republicans have to hide
> behind a John Bull to defend themselves against an
> American filmmaker from Flint, Michigan, then you know
> they're squirting hard. The Right hiding behind a
> foreigner to protect them from an American liberal.
> That's right-wing decadence at its clearest, folks.
>
>
> http://www.exile.ru/194/feature_story.html
>
>
>
>
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