Noam Chomsky in "Encirclement: Neo-Liberalism Ensnares Democracy"

If ever there was a conspiracy theory that had every likelihood of being true, it’s that a shadowy cabal of billionaires are meeting at some remote location in the Swiss Alps (perhaps the Hotel Mont Pelerin, or the latest Bilderberg stronghold) to plot how to most effectively screw the rest of the world. Michael Moore’s new film Capitalism: A Love Story may have garnered the most attention this season for taking aim at the secret practices and predations of the super wealthy, but recently, an entire swathe of films has appeared that shine the light on the moneyed elite and their economic empire.

Erwin Wagenhofer’s Let’s Make Money, Leslie Cockburn’s American Casino, Renzo Martens’ Episode 3—Enjoy Poverty, Kevin Stocklin’s We All Fall Down, and Richard Brouillette’s three hour epic Encirclement: Neo-Liberalism Ensnares Democracy have all been released within the past year, and have popped up at film festivals around the globe.

Although this glut might appear to be a reaction to the current global money meltdown, many of the films were many years in the making—especially Brouillette’s, which took more than 12 years to create. That they should all should emerge roughly at the same time is serendipitous. (Or maybe it speaks to some even larger invisible hand at work.)

The one percent (or less) of the population that comprise the wealthiest demographic on the planet are different from the rest of us. Perhaps, much like the poor, they’ve always been with us, but never before in the history of human society has the entire collected wealth of the world, been so densely concentrated. How exactly did it come to be?

It may a simple enough question, but the answers are Byzantine in their complexity. There is simply too much to know, too many details filling the air with smoke and flying pieces of paper.

Nowhere is this more evident than in Brouillette’s film Encirclement, which is not even really so much a film as a lecture series. Even the title sounds like a treatise. All the same, if you can keep your eyes propped open, it may be one of the most chilling films in recent memory.

The film is divided into chapters, which is actually the best way to watch it. Take in some information, then go have a cup of tea before you dive back into dense stuff like “Chapter 8: Neo-Liberalism or Neo-Colonialism? Strong-Arm Tactics of the Financial Markets,” in which Noam Chomsky demonstrates the ability of financial power brokers to make global political decisions.

As the varied talking heads lay out exactly how neo-liberalism sacrificed public good for private profit and economic meltdown resulted, a shadow world is revealed in which real power, pooled in liquidities and off-shore reserves, is massaged and manipulated by an army of financiers, analysts, and grey-suited think-tanks. This shadow government surpasses all borders and agencies, and ultimately serves only one master. If you were about to say Satan, you’re not far wrong. It’s the bottom line.

The one thing watching all of these films en masse can do is at least clear up any residual or lingering uncertainty about “us” and “them.” The rich are definitely out to get us, and they have the means (be it private security firms, or the entire American army) and the methodology (untaxable offshore bank accounts housed in the Isle of Guernsey) to do it.

But against such a gargantuan world-eating monstrosity, what can one possibly do, except—as in a bear attack—roll over and play dead?

I wish I had better answers, but after plowing through three hours of Encirclement, I felt utterly outflanked, outgunned and outmaneuvered. I’m sure most people would feel the same. The film does not end on an upbeat note; rather, the completeness of its argument squelches hope of resistance.

But before we collectively offer up our soft underbellies to the devouring maw, stop and think. Brouillette’s own stated intent for his documentary was to make “A film about mind-control, brainwashing, ideological conformism; about the omnipresent irrefutability of a new monotheism, with its engraved commandments, burning bushes and golden calves.”

Which all sounds rather biblical, but in the war against Mammon, perhaps, the symbolism is apt. The sense of religious convergence is similar to that of the conspiracy theory. The moment when you step over from denial to acceptance, and begin to believe that there is a bigger truth out there, everything shifts. In this guerrilla campaign, information is a weapon.

Documentaries, bless their stubborn contrary hearts, continue to be one of the few media forms that still squeak and squawk. Everything else has pretty much been bought up, silenced or infantilized into blithering stupidity (yes, I’m looking at you, mainstream media). Arm yourself with facts and arguments. Don’t trust anyone, especially not a man in a suit. Bankers, brokers, or real estate agents, are all in on it.

There’s a reason they call it free thinking. It may be the last free thing around.

In a moment of supposed comedy, Savage interviewed a man claiming to be Moore, whose voice was disgustingly garbled by the sucking and chewing noises of someone stuffing his face with food. At one point the Moore character screamed at a nearby waiter who couldn’t deliver food fast enough. “I’m Michael Moore,” he yelled, before simpering something about a gay lover. So, according to neo-con America, the director of Fahrenheit 9/11 cannot make a valid point about the current administration because he is fat (true), rude (probably) and gay (who knows).

You might expect, but not realistically hope for, more clarity or depth from the American right on the subject of Fahrenheit 9/11. The important fact about Moore at present is that the right seems genuinely afraid of him. Witness the breathless and paranoid woman swooping into Moore’s frame as he films a dead soldier’s grieving mother in front of the White House. “This is all staged,” the woman screeches, and her desperation is unmistakable. She is the entire neo-conservative elite, furious at Moore for suggesting an awful truth at a time when patriotic fantasies are the only acceptable narratives.

Because of Moore’s well-documented “I’m just a schlub like you” populism, he is a very real danger to the red state power base. For the silver-spooned Bush to prop up his cynical man-of-the-people act, all critics of Republicanism should be easily dismissed as eastern seaboard elite who have never tasted melted nacho cheese. All anti-Bush people should get manicures, regardless of their gender. “Those” people should think a greyhound is just a delightful cocktail served in South Beach, Miami. Moore’s Flint, Michigan, pedigree, baggy-ass jeans and Denny’s Grand Slam appetite make him immune to these traditional Republican jibes. Whereas Bush flaunts a pretty effective down-homeism, Moore just lives it, and can better communicate an honest and genuine knowledge of the real concerns of Middle America. All that’s left to the Republicans is to point at Moore and say, “He so fat. He so gay.” Or, as in the case of Canadian neo-cons, to launch a petition to have Moore criminally charged for expressing a dissenting opinion.

What the right doesn’t seem to realize is they don’t need to attack Moore. They can just sit back and wait for moderates and the left to take Moore out on their own. Weirdly, though (sigh) not surprisingly, the most cogent criticism of Fahrenheit 9/11 has come from the left.

A couple of days after the film’s release in Toronto, I heard a reviewer on CBC Radio One raving about the film’s popularity and its potential political effect south of the border. She then went on to bemoan much of Moore’s technique. Apparently, the reviewer loved Roger and Me, but started to have doubts about Moore in Bowling for Columbine when he held Canada up as the social antidote for a crumbling America. This new film, she suggested, has too many such cheap tricks in it, which Moore “doesn’t need to use.” Meanwhile, the ever-moderate New Yorker, which just a few months ago ran a fawning portrait of the filmmaker, decided it was time to reverse the flow of love in the name of objectivity. In the New Yorker review, Fahrenheit 9/11 is generally welcomed but Moore himself is called a “polemicist,” his methods are labeled “tricky and too easy,” and he is accused of displaying a “paranoia so engulfing that it has blocked out normal skepticism.”

What the CBC and the New Yorker are engaged in is TLC—timid lefty contortionism, the Pilates-like stretching and bending necessary to make a socially progressive slam dunk into just another polite point in an even-handed game. It’s the same impulse that transforms a revolutionary moment for the Canadian left—say, the NDP leading in 28 ridings late on election night, very nearly grasping the balance of power in a progressive government—into business as usual for the ever-arrogant Liberal party. God forbid strategic voting should ever win the NDP a Conservative riding at the cost of a single Liberal vote. God forbid the left in Canada should hold the line and actually vote for the left in Canada. We eat Moore, apparently, for the same reason we vote Liberal, because our anger with the right must never overshadow our own self-criticism and self-doubts.

The only nearly respectable critique of Moore from the left was from the furious typing fingers of Slate magazine columnist Christopher Hitchens. In his late-June posting, he charges Moore with outright manipulation, suggesting the film is Leni Riefenstahl-style propaganda. He calls Moore’s work, among other things, “a spectacle of abject political cowardice masking itself as a demonstration of ‘dissenting’ bravery.” Of course, Hitchens’s bilious lefty contrarianism has been well-documented since he made way for our very own Naomi Klein at The Nation and began hurling rhetorical feces at anyone who might question the logic of invading Iraq. That Hitchens should dislike Moore or his film is not surprising, but the level of anger in this review, which at one point descends into a schoolyard-style invitation to fight—“Any time, Michael my boy…. Let’s see what you’re made of”—is pathetic. I have infinite respect for Hitchens’s grasp of international affairs, and I’ll take an attack inspired by genuine dislike over wishy-washy backpedalling anytime, but Hitchens’s swipe at Moore’s honesty is itself full of a rhetorical trickery far beneath this disciplined intellectual. It’s Moore’s schtick to leave things out. Hitchens shouldn’t be borrowing this schtick to counter it.

Indeed, contrary to what the CBC and the New Yorker fuss about, Moore does need his cheap tricks. He’s a cheap trick artist—the best the left has. What we need Moore and his very funny, very emotionally engaging movie for is to directly counter, on the same level of honesty, the grotesque spectacle of Colin Powell pointing to dots on fuzzy satellite photographs and saying we think that thing there is designed to kill American babies. You want cheap tricks and political manipulation? Read the transcript of the 2003 State of the Union address. You want embarrassing dishonesty? Observe the spectacle of a war president with a military record worth censoring. The Bush administration dragged public discourse down into that basement rec-room of debate. That they found Moore waiting for them there is nothing for the left to be embarrassed or frighteningly angry about. When the fight’s over down there, and it increasingly looks like Moore will be delivering the final wedgie, maybe Hitchens, the New Yorker and the CBC can move it back up into the pundit-rich studios and newsrooms. Until then, we on the left should leave the big man alone and let him do what we all want him to do.