Michael Moore: Stupid White Man

Tim Sewell

I'm certainly no great fan of Michael Moore - for the reasons you state and more - but I think you're way off the mark on WikiLeaks. In fact, the example of the cables you give undermines your second criticsism. Assange has repeatedly stated that his aim is to bring transparency to the dealings of all conspiritorial governments and not to focus on the US. In fact several of their past exposures have had nothing to do with the US - notably in the case of Kenyan corruption where their work has led to real change on the ground.

He may be a geek, but I believe him to be genuine in his desire to hold all governments, especially oppressive ones, to account.

Marcus Kool

the author did not do his homework and did NOT verify the facts before he write this "story".
Michael Moore has already published details that the film was broadcasted in Cuba nationwide and that a minister of Cuba made public comments on the film. You can find the information on Google.

Raul

Then again Nick, many, many people will never forgive you the miles of column inches your wrote which suggested that the "liberating" Americans, buoyed (as always) with the most benign intentions, would transform Iraq into, to quote you, "a happy land where merry children frolicked in the park." A self-deluded lie - again to quote you - "worthy of Leni Riesenthal."

Abtalyon

Isn't it strange that turning a blind eye to the obvious when it clashes with a pre-determined agenda has such a long tradition among the anti-Western left? A tradition going back to the Haldanes and the Blacketts in the thirties.

Ricky

A very timely article, Nick.

It appears on the very day that the beneficent Dear Leader, Uncle to the People, Hero of the Shining Revolutionary Path to Socialism - Hugo Chavez (and friend of Comrade Livingstone) has acquired even more unelected powers to spread the eternal happiness that is socialism. No one needed to vote for it as it's goodness speaks for itself and is welcomed in open arms by the dear proletariat and peasants, mindful of the blessings such total control bestows upon their lives.........congratulations from the bien pesant of Hampstead & Highgate "intellectual gulag" and points south.

The Western commentariat love tyrannies, so break open the Dame Pollingers without delay.

seb

How wonderfully entertaining it would be if this article appeared on The Guardian's site. We'd have all sorts of troglodyte Marxist relics tapping away on their keyboards to denounce you, Nick, and to assert that people always frolic wherever and whenever brutal, imperialist American hegemony has been overthrown by democracy-loving humanitarians like Fidel Castro.

Guardian-readers love Moore. He is proof that out of three hundred million apparently obese morons in America, at least one is a progressive servant of mankind. Moore, of course, is an obese liar.

Chris

HaHa Brilliant. Don't expect it to have any affect whatsoever on Moore's reputation amongst the European/ American left.

call me dave

Lefties like Cuba's "free healthcare" and "free education" but don't care about the lack of free speech, a free press or free elections.

David

I read a history of the gulag recently. Apparently, when Gorky visited the Solovetski gulag. The prisoners, who had been newly washed and dressed, held the newspapers they had been given upside down to signal that all was not as it seems. But is enthusiasm for the soviet humanism blinded him to it.

Erica Blair

Or is it Nick Cohen, stupid white man?

Sicko was not banned in Cuba, it was shown on national television and in movie theatres!

Perhaps Nick shouldn't take American propaganda at face value, as he did when he supported the invasion of Iraq.

As his hero George Bush once said,

"There's an old saying in Tennessee — I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can't get fooled again." —Nashville, Tenn., Sept. 17, 2002

Being accused of self-delusion by Nick Cohen is like being called ugly by a frog.

dan

You are aware, are you, that 'The First Circle' was a work of fiction? It's a fantasy-world that deconstructs purported misinformation with novels having an axe to grind.

Like: someone has a friend who knows someone who had a dream that Nixon was a lesbian communist, and...'THAT JUST PROVES IT, RIGHT, PUT THAT IN YOUR PIPE AND SMOKE IT...'

Dave Weeden

*The Michael Moore example shows that that kind of self-delusion – and that kind of willingness to delude others – did not end with the fall of the Berlin Wall.*

Quite! http://mmflint.me/h5emEW

dan

The real story before us is not about WikiLeaks, Assange, Moore. Or Cuban health-care for that matter.

The issue is the complacent claim that the Leaks actually show the internal culture of U.S. foreign policy is basically that of an 'honest broker'. It would be bad enough if that claim, based speciously on the fact that the vast bulk of cables in fact don't show much of anything surprising, is falsified on the 5%, say, that are genuinely new, relevant, counter-intuitive, and/or nasty. Such is bad news, or good news, and it is true news, and material for the history books, let alone journalism; let no one pretend otherwise.

No, what is disturbing is that the cuban Leak suggests that some sectors of the internal culture of U.S. foreign policy are prepared to LIE to each other. That is really disturbing. It means that when a Rumsfeld, or Clinton, or Obama speaks on official matters of policy, they really believe what they are telling Mr. Cohen, or Mr. Blitzer, or their foreign counterparts is God's objective, unvarnished truth.

I would hope that one fruitful outcome of the Leaks would be that some officials, at LEAST, would be sacked in the near-future. Lying to the world, the President, and themselves.

John Edwards

A short clip of a child flying a kite hardly qualifies as a depiction of happy life under Saddam Hussain. What Moore said was that Iraq was a country which had "never attacked the United States, had never threatened to attack the United States and had never killed an American citizen". Consequently there was no justification in the US invading Iraq. A statement with which it is difficult to disagree.

victor jara 67

Unlike you who was an apolgist for US war crimes in Iraq like Fallujah, Abu Graib and Haditha. Mr Moore was one of the first to expose the brutality of the invasion and occupation and the legitamacy of the Iraqi resistance.

David Lindsay

"Cuba is the country to which I would move if I really did want a government that persecuted those who engaged in homosexual acts." I have written that many times, in various places. It really, really, really gets under certain people's skins.

Now that there is no longer an American Administration full of people who have never recanted their Trotskyism, President Obama should lift the entire blockade, which only attracts sympathy to this regime that does not deserve it, perhaps most notable as the model for Britain's impregnable pseudo-comprehensive schools by means of which the real, but vigorously self-denying, ruling class perpetuates itself from generation to generation.

The Cuban pretend-exiles are in fact economic migrants and free to go back any time they like. Far from being conservative, they merely wish to restore the Cuba that existed before 1959, a giant drug den and brothel for the American super-rich.

But Nick Cohen really cannot forgive anyone who was right about Iraq. Whatever Iraq was like under Saddam Hussein, that is indisputably better than what Iraq is like now. How bad does that make what we have done in and to Iraq? Well, what you have done, Nick. Nothing to do with some of us.

daniel Lionsden

More on Moore, Mr Cohen! (or should that read moron Moore?) Some of the hilariously embittered comments we are seeing here shows you are getting under their skins.
I fancy your column is basically a modern version of Shakespeare's rebuttal of Falstaff:
I have long dreamd of such a kind of man,
So surfeit-swelled, so old and so profane;
But, being awaked, I do despise my dream.
Make less thy body hence, and more thy grace;
Leave gormandizing; know the grave doth gape
For thee thrice wider than for other men.
Reply not to me with a fool-born jest:
Presume not that I am the thing I was;
For God doth know, so shall the world perceive,
That I have turned away my former self.

Old Slaughter

@John Edwards

"never attacked the United States, had never threatened to attack the United States and had never killed an American citizen"

It is easy to disagree with that. Apart from the simple fact that US servicemen were killed in Desert Storm (granted, Iraq did not attack but that is a technically a US citizen killed), there is the clear case of Iraqi involvement in international terrorism that killed US citizens. This would disprove Moore's statement would it not?

These links can be quite indirect, like Saddam paying rewards to the families of suicide murderers in Palestine that killed US citizens in Israel. or they can be more direct:

http://www.husseinandterror.com/

Check this link and view the case for Iraqi involvement in terrorism. If you can stick by Moore's statement afterwards I would like to hear your justification.

Old Slaughter

@David Linsey

"Whatever Iraq was like under Saddam Hussein, that is indisputably better than what Iraq is like now."

For whom? Everyone?

"How bad does that make what we have done in and to Iraq? Well, what you have done, Nick. Nothing to do with some of us."

This is frankly bollocks. I think it racist also. It assumes that all those murders by Muslim on Muslim are inevitable results of toppling Saddam. As if that's just what those people do to each other.

victor jara 67

Ah Jez,

Seemed to have touched a nerve,

You were not part of British effort that was defeated in Basra and ended up taking shelter at the airport from the same Iraqi resistance?

Yow Min Lye

If Cuba ever had a superb health care system then it was built on the back of Soviet subsidies as quid pro quo for Castro's nuisance value to the Americans.

Once the Soviet Union bit the dust and the subsidies were withdrawn, then Cuba's universal health care collapsed.

John Edwards

Old Slaughter
In the words of George Tenet head of the CIA on 29 April 2007 "We could never verify that there was any Iraqi authority, direction and control, complicity with al-Qaeda for 9/11 or any operational act against America,period".

I think the CIA is likely to be a little more authorative that the nutjob right wing website you have been looking at.

Rob

He did the same thing with the NHS - portrayed it as some flawless nirvana. Although I still agree with him that America's healthcare system is immoral.

Charles Restino

Again Nick Cohen lets his zeal to discredit Michael Moore and the government of Cuba, out run the journalistic requirement to check the facts. Sicco, it turns out was even shown on Cuban national television. I'm sure your friends' case of food poisoning was as much propaganda as the rest of the article.

Jez

Victor Jara 67.

No.

But a couple or so of people i'm lucky enough to call friends were over there..

- their effort was never 'defeated' pal.

Top lads.

Your bullshit is contradictory.

You scream about 'brutal war crimes'- but if the Multinational Force actually would have employed the tactics of the brutal war crime ridden Baathist regime that they toppled, then they would probably have had recieved as much resistance that Saddam did whilst he was terrorising Iraq.

So what is it?

Are the West too bad.... or are they too good- so they have to get out quick?

What an Idiot you are mate.

msmarmitelover

Hmm, don't like this. Easy targets, not your best work.

Old Slaughter

@John Edwards,

"We could never verify that there was any Iraqi authority, direction and control, complicity with al-Qaeda for 9/11 or any operational act against America,period".

Who mentioned 9/11? Perhaps read a source before junking it. None of the terrorist deaths implied were on that date. Only a passing mention to the Atta connection is made. Nice to see a closed mind.

"I think the CIA is likely to be a little more authorative that the nutjob right wing website you have been looking at."

Ah, the appeal to authority. The CIA is right about little, I wonder how often you cite it as a reputable source? Only when it suits hey?

Resist the lizards

Michael Moore: Wealthy Capitalist Hypocrite surely?

Bill Corr

Surely the most astounding recent Wikileaks disclosure is that The One in the White House and 'I-landed-under-sniper-fire-in-Bosnia' Hilary ordered the U.S. Embassy in London to reach out to, and engage with, militant Islamists in Britain, presumably in the hope of making then more likely to love America.

Compared to THAT, the quality of health care in Cuba is a non-issue.

victor jara 67

Jez,
Saddam was murdering the Kurds in 1988 but Pax Americana was covering up his war crimes and we were actually supply the chemicals.
He was our ally against the Mullahs in Tehran then. It was only when he threatened our oil interest in 1990 that he became public enemy No1 and the Kurds became "rightous victims".

By 2003 he was little threat. The neo-con "great thinkers"behind the invasion thought they would be welcomed as liberators as most Iraqis loarthed Saddam. They also despised US/UK for the 13 years of punitive sanctions which resulted in the deaths of half million Iraqi children.

The unpalatable truth for little Englander imperialists like you is the Iraqi resistance had wide spread popular support and was not just Saddam loylaists and foreign al qaeda.

I suggest you read Johnathoan Steele Defeat or Dahr Jamail Beyond The Green Zone for a correct anylis of the Invasion and occupation of Iraq.

Jez

Thanks for the history lesson there.

So what is it;

Are you a full blown Commie or just a subversive anti-Western manipulator of the truth, like Michael Moore for instance?

victor jara 67

Jez,
Neither. Just can't stand pseudo journalists like Cohen who advocate war but are rarely prepared to do the fighting and dying.

Along with Bush, Blair et al Many Journalists in the main stream media share responsibilty for the carnage that was Iraq as they fed a gullable public the deceptions, lies and half truths that was the case for that war.
Journalists should be holding those in power to account rather than serving them as Cohen was with Iraq.

David Lindsay

Old Slaughter, indisputably better for Iraqi women, for Iraqi Christians, and for the Iraqi branch of that most Arab of phenomena, the Anglophile middle class (you certainly don't get that Somewhere Else In The Region). Just for a start.

And yes, the Muslim-on-Muslim violence is also the inevitable consequence of the removal of the man who kept a lid on it.

In fact, he was removed in order to flood Iraq with jihadis, the easier to shoot at them. At least, that was the idea. The Christians were the bait in this Straussian game, which should come as no surprise to anyone, since America and her little helpers are always friendliest towards the most anti-Christian regimes in the Middle East (Israel, Turkey, Egypt, the Gulf monarchs, what Iraq has become) against those most inclusive of Christians (Iran, Syria, Lebanon, the two parts of Palestine on either side of the Jordan, what Iraq used to be).

Resist the lizards, Moore is an American liberal. But a capitalist is just another of the distasteful things about them. Bringing us to Bill Corr, spot on.

Ronnie

Nick Cohen, a journalist rightly campaigning against secretive propaganda in Cuba while, simultaneously, campaigning in favour of secretive propaganda here.

Cubans have a right to know what is being said and done in their name but not us?

Let's have some consistency and a lot less of this misguided, state-loving, 'patriotism'.

Steve

Ronnie,

Apparently you do not know the difference between 'secrecy' and 'privacy'.

Victor Jara 67,

Apparently you don't know the difference between expressing your own opinion and slavishly supporting somebody else's.

You people should disengage from any sort of debate until you have grown up a bit. In the meantime, try thinking for yourselves rather than just repeating everything you hear on the BBC, it's really quite liberating. Then try reading a bit about the people who fought and died, or just died, for your freedoms and reflect on the hypocrisy and cowardice of opposing the fight, still on going, for the freedoom of others.

victor jara 67

Steve,
Are you talking about the hero's who massacred over 2000 civillians in Fallujah or sexually assulted inmates at Abu graib or even the ones who murdred civillians in Haditha and many more.

Sorry Steve the 279 who died in Iraq died for nothing and on a pack of lies and many of their families feel very bitter about it.

Wien1938

The Michael Moores of the West have been looking for a new collectivist (utopian) vision since before 1989.
Assange and his crew talk about transparency but focus exclusively on the US.