//Fahrenheit 9/11, Propaganda and Enthusiasm

Fahrenheit 9/11 is propaganda disguised as documentary. Which doesn't make it any less true, just more powerful. Any radical idea defended with enthusiasm can only be propaganda, because enthusiasm means a side has been taken -the opposite of objectivity-. But lack of objectivity doesn't make any piece of information untrue -just human. Westerners are suckers for objectivity. If anybody flaunts their lack of objectivity or takes and obvious side he or she and everything he or she says is immediately invalidated. But why? Lack of objectivity means a human opinion is at work: someone interested in the information has given it his or her own twist, has associated it with something else, has judged and weighted it. Lack of objectivity, as I already have said, does not mean the author is lying, just that now that piece of information has a personality. As long as it's the truth, it can have whichever personality it wants. And as long as both sides are presented, either by the same party or two different parties, we should be grateful for enthusiasm.

Micheal Moore used propaganda techniques because they work. They work and he wanted his point of view to get somewhere, and propaganda is a fast and effective way of achieving that. Propaganda works because human beings are suckers for a well told story. It's not the same to spout statistics than to go to a real human being and ask him to tell you his story, and that story to be so painful and dramatic that it cannot be ignored: the statistic in the flesh.

Don't take me wrong. I don't think any of those stories are a lie or are staged, but they serve Micheal Moore's purposes very well, and Micheal Moore's purposes are many persons' purposes too. But most of them have no power at all to be listened to. The way I see it, before Fahrenheit 9/11 there was this void, a distress void per se, where USA citizens hadn't been collectively sad or mournful for the deaths of their soldiers and Iraqi citizens, because the media refused to show them. It's as if they didn't even exist before this movie, as if it were a video game, where the body count is nothing but a number and the actual bodies disappear into thin air after a while. This becomes very obvious in the movie itself, with this woman who lived in Flint and was pro war and pro-enlist-your-kids, but then her son died. Seeing her cry like that, it's a very fitting example of emotional argument from propaganda, but it also rings very true, and there's no way you can ignore a crying mother.

Micheal Moore's technique was necessary because in a war against silence there's no space for whispers and lukewarm intentions. No space for half-felt indignation. Micheal Moore had to shout as loud as he could, as profane and as blasphemous and human as he could to get attention. And yet, it wasn't enough.

A knife is just a knife. What does that mean? It means that a tool is a tool, like a knife is just a knife or propaganda is just propaganda. It is not that it is used or not that is important, but the intentions and the message behind that tool. A knife can easily cut meat or cut your mother, propaganda can easily be nazi or be Greenpeace. It is easy to dismiss propaganda as a shameful action sent from hell, but like everything, it is not the object, but the intention behind the object that counts in the end. Propaganda is always used from both sides, after all. In the end, Micheal Moore used it to try and stop a war, which is never a bad idea. And after all, if anything he said had been untrue, they would have already, pardon the expression, sued his ass off.

If there is something that Moore accomplished during his movie is squeeze your heart. The story is so sad, so tragic, so unfair you get the constant urge to swear like a sailor and impeach Bush while you are at it. Which is probably what he wanted, because that is probably what he constantly feels, and he effectively transferred that feeling unto others.

So, hey, if enthusiasm makes my ideas become propaganda, who cares. Long live enthusiasm!