NP Michael Moore

[Otto]

Just a few points from that Hitchens-text I'd like to comment on:

"Richard Clarke, Bush's former chief of counterterrorism, has come forward
to say that he, and he alone, took the responsibility for authorizing those
Saudi departures."

Well, just as George Tenet took the responsibility for the CIA-errors. Mr.
Bush can count on his paladins when the real goal is re-election. What
Clarke forgot to tell is *why* he did it when all private air traffic was
grounded?

"(...) the bad period when Washington preferred Saddam to the likewise
unmentioned Ayatollah Khomeini (...)."

Oh yes, a bad period indeed, the protagonists are still in power. But
Hitchens does it away as a mere "period," I get the increasing impression
that the author is unable to detect patterns in politics.

"Saddam boasted publicly of his financial sponsorship of suicide bombers in
Israel."

Yes, he had chosen his side just as the USA did by delivering weapons of
mass destruction to Israel. What's bad about it? Aren't the Palestinians
allowed to fight the "enemy" (from their point of view) which is keeping
their land since 1967, is attacking towns and refugee camps with Merkava
tanks, Apache helis and F-16? It's a strange idea of a war in which only one
side should be allowed to kill.

Ariel Sharon blames the International Court for the latest suicide bombing,
but for me it as well might be a proof that the fence cannot make Israel
safe. What if the fact that there haven't been any attacks in the last weeks
isn't a result of the fence (as it was claimed by Sharon) but of the work of
the Palestinian authorities? What if the Palestinian leadership slowly comes
to terms that terrorism never will get them a sovereign state?

On quoting Orwell:
Maybe Orwell did change his views between 1945 and 1948?

On pacifism:

"If Michael Moore had had his way (...) Milosevic would still be the big man
(...)." -- but Moore's just a film director. Nobody wants to put him into
Colin Powell's place, let alone make him the leading Cesar of all Western
nations. The Kosovo-war was even backed by the German Greens. Outspoken
pacifists. And the then new German Red-Green government did not fall over
that question. Instead what happened was what nobody would have expected;
under NATO-rule German soldiers went to war for the first time after WW-II
not under a conservative, but under a left government. A remarkable
political pragmatism. Milosevic had to be ousted.

"The Kosovo War has sometimes been called "The Liberals' War," because it
was the liberal idealists, more than the conservative realists, who were
keen on fighting it. But I am not the first to point out that it could just
as easily be described as "The '68ers' War." That was true of the European
participants, anyway. The French participation was owed to the circle of
"former leftists." The NATO official in charge of the pacification of Kosovo
after the Serb military withdrawal was Glucksmann's hero from long ago, Dr.
Kouchner. The man who in 1998 signed the treaty that brought the Czech
Republic into NATO and therefore into the NATO intervention was Jan Kavan, a
Czech '68er. The NATO diplomat in Kosovo for a while was Jiri Dienstbier,
another Czech '68er. The secretary-general of NATO during the war was Javier
Solana, a '68er from Spain's Socialist Workers Party. And the German
participation could not have occurred without Fischer and his allies. The
'68ers' International that CohnBendit had tried to assemble in an imaginary
version back in the 1980s had finally assembled in real life, under the
auspices of NATO. An irony, you might think. But it was not an irony."
 -- "From the radicalism of the '60s to the interventionism of the '90s. The
Passion of Joschka Fischer" by Paul Berman
The New Republic, 08.27.01 (I can send this essay - which I recommend -
offlist)

Today Joschka went to Khartoum.

Otto

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Jasper Fidget" <jasper at hatguild.org>
To: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Sunday, July 11, 2004 3:58 PM
Subject: RE: NP Michael Moore


> http://slate.msn.com/id/2102723/
>
> Unfairenheit 9/11
> The lies of Michael Moore.
> By Christopher Hitchens
>
> >
> > In data 11 Jul 2004, verso le 8:06, Otto si trovò a scrivere su Re:
> > NP Michael Moore:
> >
> > > "Problem: Moore is not from Flint. He is from Davison, Michigan. The
two
> > > places are not far apart, but the social distance between them is
> > > considerable. [...] This self-serving distortion is a metaphor for the
> > > man."
> >
> > I wonder if the information that was omitted was relevant... He's not
> > from Flint, so what? As I have already said, where's the analysis of
> > the distortions and the lies etc.?
> >
> > umberto rossi
> > ___________________
> >
> > "A mulatto
> > An albino
> > A mosquito
> > My libido"
> >
> >
>
>