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Why We Fight (Eugene Jarecki 2005)

Posted on April 13 at 17.03, 2007 by Eric Mahleb

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why we fightWinner of the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance festival in 2005, Why We Fight is a well crafted documentary that unfortunately offers little new information regarding the dominance of the ‘military-industrial complex’ in the US and the plans of the neo-cons in Washington to control the Middle-East, with Saddam Hussein being simply an excuse for implementing this strategy of control and power (see also Fahrenheit 9/11).

Such a documentary would be incredibly useful if one could somehow manage to get the sceptics to watch it. But it seems that most people who will hear about it and will indeed watch it are the people who believe already and simply want to be reminded of the absurdity and sadness of it all.

For more information on this sad state of affairs, read Noam Chomsky’s book Hegemony or Survival and read the American Empire Project blog.

3 Responses to “Why We Fight”

  1. [...] Documentaries have the capacity to expose their filmmaker’s partiality, willingly or unwillingly, in a much stronger fashion than feature films can, for the simple reason that documentaries claim to portrait reality and to expose the truth. But what is the truth? Is one person, in this case, a filmmaker, capable of exposing the entire truth of a topic? Or do they simply expose mainly one side of it, their preferred side, their own understanding of the truth, which is usually a counterpoint to a dominant view or ideology? How effectively do documentaries reach out to people who do not share the views of the filmmaker and to the people who truly need to be made aware of a different angle to a certain situation? Many decent documentaries such as Why We Fight and Iraq for Sale end up mostly preaching to the choir, which certainly makes the choir feel good about their already more-or-less established convictions, but it does not do enough to make the other side question their own beliefs. [...]

  2. [...] exposing his lies and deceit. I have posted several times before about excellent documentaries and filmmakers who have done their best to show the world the damage the Bush administration has done and theamount of corruption and illegal activities it has engaged in. But W. does little to expand on this great work. Instead of confronting the viewer with the brutal truth of Bush’s lies, idioticism and corruption, this fluffy romanticization attempts to be fair and to show Bush, as an idiot yes, but as an idiot who grew up in the shadow of his brother and who was constantly seeking the approval of a distant and critical father…. [...]

  3. [...] not new. Bits and pieces can be found on the net and in various documentaries such as Loose Change, Why We Fight (2005), The War Profiteers (2006), The Corporation (2003), and America: From Freedom to Fascism (2006). [...]

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