I find this disgusting for four reasons.
1) Fox has intentionally wormed his way into the eco-socialist movement and made himself seem like he is serious about these things. For instance, just check out his interview with Chris Hedges on the TeleSur show Days of Revolt. Hedges, who has his own flaws, at least has been decent enough this year to be firm in his opposition to the Sanders campaign due to anti-imperialism. What is this charlatan’s behavior?
2) Going off this failure to account for imperialism, we can discern a tenable level of pro-imperialism in Fox’s latest film, HOW TO LET GO OF THE WORLD. He fails to articulate in that entire picture the fact that the Pentagon has the largest carbon footprint on earth. As such, his protests are essentially meaningless.
3) In a twist that can only be called one thing, typical middle-class white liberal anti-Asian racism, we are given a bait-and-switch wherein Fox puts all his ire on the Chinese. Now certainly no one in their right mind can articulate a blanket denial of the carbon footprint of the People’s Republic. But no one can take such a critical position if there is no anti-Pentagon critique embedded in it. The white supremacy here is so obvious, particularly when Fox begins to play in his paranoid games about the creeping authoritarian yellow devils who are monitoring his film production crew.
4) As such, Fox is not advocating for indigenous and Pacific Islander peoples who are highlighted in his film. He does not actually want to reverse the plight of people who will face further onslaughts from climate change. No, he wants to get us to vote for Clinton, a woman who will be the ruin of those featured in his picture. There are people around the world dying every day, suffering otherwise, due to their fight against fracking. The fine journalism of Steve Horn has recently shown through Clinton’s emails, a gift that keeps on giving, that the Queen of Chaos used her perch in the State Department to aggressively push fracking in the EU and particularly Poland, part of the greater effort to encroach on Putin’s doorstep. What a wonderful instance of neoliberal imperialism that Fox seems to be supporting!
In his duplicitous Twitter ramblings, delivered in fashion akin to the sayings from a Caesar of old, Fox has been arguing that the Green Party is not involved in the anti-fracking movement and other such nonsense. I wanted to just clear the record up here in particular because I can actually say with certainty that, in reality, this is false. My colleague Steve Ahlquist, a tremendously talented muckraker who has been on this beat for a year now, has picture proof of Rhode Island Greens being involved with the protests and logistics of a movement that partners with the town of Burrillville, who have thoroughly rejected plans to build a fracked gas power plant in this classic New England town. Check out this scoop from #JoshFoxNews:
As just an example, here is a meeting where longtime Green Greg Gerritt came out to offer public comment. Like the Communist Party USA during the Depression, our Greens are involved with a group of grassroots direct action efforts up and down the I-95 corridor. Unless I am mistaken, I think Fox has only shown up once in the Ocean State, recently for a screening of his movie. And while our Greens are opposing these awful plans, we find our Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, an alleged climate change advocate Democrat…wait for it…supporting a fracked gas power plant! Da zdrávstvujet revolyutsiya!
Now that we have dissembled that tangled web of lies, what can be said of our auteur’s corpus?
Fox is one of the millennial film makers who are following the lead of Michael Moore’s FAHRENHEIT 9/11. Ever since that tempest in a teapot was released, the film studios have keyed into something, documentaries are cheap to make and big sellers with the crowds, particularly among a subset of snooty liberals who see one of these things and think they know just everything and, more importantly, need to rub it in your face. As a result, we have seen absolute trash, such as the union-busting WAITING FOR SUPERMAN, passed off as cinematic gold because it has high production values.
Fox has an admittedly more guerrilla style. In his first film, GASLAND, there was a lower budget and a more handheld feeling to the material. This new film tries to maintain this element, offering results that can be engaging. His use of a consumer-grade drone to take impressive landscape shots in high definition is notable.
Yet just as his politics are fake, this effort to imitate Dziga Vertov’s classic panoramic MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA is simply a poor substitute. When Vertov created his picture, it was the golden age of the Soviet film culture and the director was trying to create a work that would advance the proletarian revolution by way of the silver screen, hoping to spur international support for the Leninist cause. He wrote of the work:
The film MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA represents
AN EXPERIMENTATION IN THE CINEMATIC COMMUNICATION
Of visual phenomena
WITHOUT THE USE OF INTERTITLES
(a film without intertitles)
WITHOUT THE HELP OF A SCENARIO
(a film without a scenario)
WITHOUT THE HELP OF THEATRE
(a film without actors, without sets, etc.)
This new experimentation work by Kino-Eye is directed towards the creation of an authentically international absolute language of cinema – ABSOLUTE KINOGRAPHY – on the basis of its complete separation from the language of theatre and literature.
Filmed in Ukraine and Russia, it is a portrait of Soviet society as a living organism. Fox’s effort, which we now know were done in the name of astro-turfing for the Democratic Party, tries to reveal these inter-connected anti-fracking efforts on a global level. Yet his endorsement of neoliberalism and insult to genuine democratic socialism with emphasis on ecology betrays those he claims to advocate for. Furthermore, his delusions about the power of the American presidency are so silly. Was he on Mars while Obama was being hindered by the obstructionist Republicans? I have no doubt that public spectacle was ultimately a fraud, engineered to allow the President to push the country farther to the right, but let’s still be honest, any quasi-centrist or pwogwessive policy efforts Clinton might to promote will be scuttled immediately, there is a quarter century of establishment Republican media loathing of Hillary Clinton that has festered in the hinterlands of America. Ergo his film work is the Michael Harrington of political film at a time when we need a cinematic equivalent of Lenin.
For those disillusioned Sanders supporters who are on the fence about the Green Party and walking onto the Green Welcome Mat, understand these facts:
-Two major campaign funders of Clinton are George Soros and Warren Buffett, men who have tremendous investments in fossil fuels and are involved in hindering the end of fracking. In fact, Soros backed a political group in Ukraine that opened new fracking sites across that country!
-Clinton has always been in favor of expanding fracking. The fracking efforts are part of a wider geo-political effort to cut off European subscription to Russian energy markets, a type of offensive that could lead us very soon into a serious war with a nuclear superpower.
-Clinton has begun a multi-front war on Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea so to corner energy markets. Whether it is the war in Syria or the sanctions against Pyongyang or the problematic Iran nuclear treaty, we are in the midst of a serious build-up to a new World War. A vote for Clinton is a vote for ecological catastrophe due to the massive carbon footprint of the Pentagon war machine.
-Trump has several positions that are surprisingly to the left of Clinton, including rejection of the TPP, calling for an end to NATO, saying we should expand rather than privatize Social Security (a longtime Clinton-Obama goal), and replacing the Affordable Care Act with universal healthcare. Is he serious about those things? No, he’s lying. But is his base? Absolutely, they have gone wild for it and have shown they could prove to be future allies in an anti-fracking, anti-austerity movement in the streets if we have the courage to politically educate them about chauvinism.
This acceptance of the Green Welcome Mat requires courage in the face of Nader Baiter Democrats who will lie about the Greens helping elect a Republican. Don’t believe the hype. Josh Fox wants to elect a neocon also.
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