jollygoodfeller
Minnesota
To call this movie crap would be an insult to fecal matter... — 2 years ago
Joseph Goebbels famously said, “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.” So it came as no surprise that the greatest socialist propagandist of our generation, Michael Moore, would continue to tell the “Big Lie” that we would all be better off if we just gave up “evil” capitalism for good and drank the communist Kool-aid. No, “Sicko” is not a biopic about the infamous director (although I still insist that his book “Stupid White Men” is autobiographical), but a man that continues to manipulate and distort the facts while attempting to pass himself off as a legitimate documentarian is truly sick indeed. In the beginning of Sicko, we are promised by Mr. Moore that the film wouldn’t be about the approximately 50 million Americans without health care (yet another lie) and then he proceeded to go around to various countries and attempt to show how much better they have it than Americans with socialized medicine. To be fair, I did see one thing in this film that I agreed with. In the final credits, Moore included a wonderful quote by Alexis de Tocqueville: “The greatness of America lies not in being more enlightened than any other nation, but rather in her ability to repair her faults.” And as if to add more credibility to these words, Mr. Moore reminds us that Tocqueville was French. Of course, the truly enlightened in every country understand that the way to repair faults is with less government intervention in our lives not more. And since Mr. Moore is shameless when it comes to selling out to the French (ostensibly to win another Palme d’Or) and quoting dead Frenchmen, let me use this opportunity to quote another dead Frenchman Frédéric Bastiat: “Who would not like to see all these benefits flow forth upon the world from the law, as from an inexhaustible source? But is it possible? Where does (the government) draw those resources that it is urged to dispense by way of benefits to individuals? Is it not from the individuals themselves? How, then, can these resources be increased by passing through the hands of a parasitical and voracious intermediary?” Bastiat also popularized what is known as the Broken Window Fallacy, the idea that there are hidden costs associated with purposely breaking windows (among other things) so that a certain segment of society (i.e. glassworkers) can gain from it. Never has a film been more deluded by the Broken Window Fallacy than Sicko. Just listen to Moore gush about how the French get free laundry service from the government! There are no hidden costs there, right? And these “necessary” perks are not available in the US because Americans are the most selfish, uncaring people on the earth, right? So this filmmaker would have you believe. Consider how he portrays a woman being tossed out of a health care facility like refuse. He conveniently fails to mention that under the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act it is illegal to refuse people emergency service due to their inability to pay for it, but why bother to state the facts when depicting human suffering is such effective propaganda? Furthermore, if these catastrophic events are really occurring and bodies are piling up in the streets, why doesn’t Mr. Moore do something about it immediately?! I know it’s hard to give up such a lavish lifestyle, but perhaps he could forego riding in chauffeured limousines (maybe even skip a few meals?) at least until this “disaster” is averted. So delusioned by his Robin Hood approach to save the world from capitalism and oblivious to the true cost of socialism, Moore interviews residents of Cuba about the “great” benefits of universal health care and how cheap it is (more broken windows). No mention about how under law 88, any dissent whatsoever would get these Cubans up to 15 years in prison. This would be like asking a slave if he was being treated well right in front of his master. One of the Cubans Moore interviews happens to be Aleida Guevara. No mention, of course, that her father Che was an ardent socialist and mass murderer who executed thousands. The irony was apparently lost on Moore. Of course, the genocide in Latin America pales in comparison to the atrocities perpetrated in places like Russia, China, and Cambodia in the 20th century. In fact, regimes calling themselves socialists have murdered over 100 million people since 1917. Millions more perished because their governments couldn’t feed them. These are the real, explicit costs of socialism that you will never see in a Michael Moore film. He seems to be more concerned with obscurantism and self-loathing than telling you the truth. The apex of Moore’s self-hatred comes at the point in the film where he dejectedly asks the audience, “Who are we? and what has happened to our soul?” So I will end this review by answering these questions. Just as far-left academians, politicians, and socialist filmmakers are conspiring to make us feel guilty for our vast wealth and telling us we are the most greedy and miserly group of people that ever lived, America has set an all-time record for charitable giving, donating more than 295 billion dollars last year, more than any civilization in the history of the world. Notice how that is not money taken by force and squandered by a parasitical and voracious intermediary (i.e. the IRS, socialist governments). But surely this must be a mistake becuase Mr. Moore is telling us that the French are so much more compassionate. Perhaps the French don’t produce as much as the evil Americans who profit on the backs of the poor and we should check the amount of donations relative to a country’s wealth. How much then, did these countries give as a percentage of their gross domestic product? That would be 1.7% for the Americans and a whopping 0.14% for the French. So much for Mr. Moore telling us how selfish we are in relation to the rest of the world, especially the French. Could it be that this filmmaker is so deluded by utopian dreams of a society with the basic principle: “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need” (as quoted directly from Karl Marx by a French doctor in Sicko) that he is willing to deceive his audiences to achieve it? After all, the end justifies the means, right? Fortunately, the majority of Americans are not fooled. They understand that there is no such thing as a free lunch (neither free healthcare nor free laundry service) and that the society that Mr. Moore wants us all to have in reality would make everyone equally poor. And so it is that Mr. Moore has discovered a powerful medium (film) and means (deceitful propaganda) to achieve his desired end (socialism), just like those that came before him… wonderful people like Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Guevara, and Castro. Thankfully, we are not all drinking the Kool-aid just yet.
Comments
usdenick
Santa Monica
I think you're taking a lot of things our of context
I have not seen Sicko, but have seen some of Moore’s other films and I’d like to reply to some of your claims.
There is a difference between advocating some social policies and being a socialist. Also, there is a big difference between being socialist and being a communist. You make some pretty big blanket statements in your review that seem to say that all of these things (advocating socialist policies, being a socialist and being a communist) are all the same.
You can advocate more socialist programs for a democratic and capitalistic country. That does not make you nor the country you are advocating them for a communist.
Also, yes, socialist countries have messed up and killed people. So has America. We’re not talking about that, Moore is simply talking about how to get the best health care the most people at the lowest cost.
The US is ahead in a lot of things, it is simply not ahead in health care. Pretty much all European countries get better health care to more people at (significantly) lower overall cost than does the US. We can fix that, but we’re afraid to because we don’t want to force the rich to give up their money and we don’t want to be called “socialists.” That’s all.
We are more greedy but we call this greediness “independence”. Europeans may give less charity, but they take care of each other by paying much more taxes than we do. Their governments also give much more in aid to foreign countries as a percentage of the GDP than does the US. And still, all EU countries are capitalistic.
jollygoodfeller
Minnesota
Red Kool-Aid
I’ve never heard of anyone critiquing a review of a movie they haven’t even bothered to see, but I will be more than happy to respond to your comments, Nick. First of all, I am well aware of the subtle difference between socialism and communism. What I am concerned about is how much they have in common: both systems forcibly take wealth from the top producers in society then redistribute it to those who produce the least (or don’t produce at all) and both systems have a long history of failing miserably. I could give you an extensive list of these failures but time or space will not permit me. And in case I wasn’t specific in my review, not only are these systems inefficient and wasteful but in penalizing hard work and creativity, they are immoral. In my review, I specifically wrote how communist governments have called themselves socialists. I did this to ensure that no one would be confused, but apparently I was mistaken. You are certainly welcome to call this a blanket statement but the fact is that numerous authors have used these terms interchangeably (i.e. former socialist Joshua Muravchik in Heaven on Earth). Nevertheless, just so I don’t cause any more confusion, I will henceforth refer to such regimes as socialist/communist. I find it quite interesting that just after you accuse me of making “big blanket statements”, you write the following: “socialist countries have messed up and killed people. So has America.” I don’t think I’ve ever seen a bigger (or more misguided) blanket statement than that one. Presumably, you don’t think we “messed up” when we killed people while saving the world from Nazism, Japanese Militarism, Al-Qaeda? Perhaps you were talking about the 16,000 Filipino soldiers dead in the Philippine-American War, one war we were clearly in the wrong? That was indeed a tragedy, but since then over 100 million have been murdered by socialist/communist regimes. Your “big blanket statement” equating America with socialist/communist regimes turns out to be 4 orders of magnitude off! That is not a trivial difference. It would be like saying the atrocities committed by Idi Amin are equivalent to Ted Kennedy (responsible for just 1 death). If you honestly believe that socialist/communist governments of the past are morally equivalent to the American government (which would have to effectively murder 1/3 of its population to match their death toll), then you will fit right in among the left-wing extremists of Santa Monica. Right after making this colossal blanket statement you then dismiss it by writing, “we’re not talking about that” as if genocide were some trifling, nugatory issue. Well, of course YOU are not talking about that, Nick. Why would YOU, Michael Moore or anyone else with a socialist agenda acknowledge the explicit link between socialism/communism and genocide? Or perhaps you think it’s just some strange coincidence that these governments tend to end up murdering lots of people. The truth, of course, is that when people stop achieving power and wealth through merit they will start to do it through Machiavellian political maneuvering which often includes shutting down both the opposition party and opposition press through any means necessary often leading to mass murder. You can see this beginning to happen today in Venezuela under the socialist Hugo Chavez and it should surprise no one in the West when this felon starts mudering people to achieve his desired ends. You then go on to claim that the United States is not ahead in health care. You define being ahead as being able to offer something at the lowest cost. You mean the more the government steals taxpayer money to subsidize a given industry, the more that particular industry is ahead?! That is really interesting logic, Nick. If that’s all we need to “get ahead” then why doesn’t the government do this more often to more industries? If they do this enough we could be “ahead” in every industry, right?! I could continue with this reductio ad absurdum but in reality, people that have even the faintest knowledge of economics understand why this won’t work, to say nothing about how “free” health care would limit personal choice or the income of Americans in the medical field. When you focus exclusively on lowering cost (through subsidies) and not on real consumer purchasing power, you are committing the most base and infantile error in economics. Don’t feel too bad about this because our government still makes this error on a regular basis. I have already explained the dynamics behind this when I wrote about Bastiat’s broken window fallacy in my review so if you still can’t grasp this concept I would suggest you enroll in a basic economics course. I would not recommend an economics couse in Santa Monica however, as the academic institutions there continue to fall for the same error time and again and don’t recognize the vast benefits of neoliberal economics. Finally, you really begin to tip your hand when you start calling Americans greedy. Let’s examine your assertion more closely. I have taken the following definition of greed from the dictionary: excessive desire to acquire or possess more (especially more material wealth) than one deserves. Let’s look at the “greediest” in America and see if this definition applies to them. For example, let’s examine our two richest Americans, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, who have paid more taxes than virtually anyone else in the history of the world (so much for your assertion that we don’t want to force the rich to give up their money – we already have). These men, who already have had billions of dollars forcibly extracted from them, are both committed to giving away their wealth. You are certainly welcome to call people who give away the money they earn “greedy” but that is the exact opposite of the definition of greedy. The real greedy in America, those who have an excessive desire to possess more than they deserve, are the Americans looking for government handouts: this includes, but is not limited to welfare (both personal and corporate), “free” laundry service, and yes, “free” health care. But of course, that’s really not what my review was all about. You conveniently tiptoed around my criticism of the film’s director. You claim to have seen his other movies so please respond to the overwhelming backlash against these films. For example, can you defend a director who exploits an amputee (who fully supported the President ironically) to further his pacifist views, resorts to using a phony mock-up of a newspaper article (with the wrong date!)while passing it off as legitimate and creatively editing a speech by Charlton Heston (who was well-known for his work as a civil rights activist) to make him appear racist and insensitive? The list goes on and on but this is a good place to start. Please enlighten us about the other movies that you actually have seen from this director instead of commiserably defending a movie you haven’t.