Realpolitik: `Trials of Henry Kissinger' & `Bowling for Columbine' - Screen

As a kid I had a "radical" uncle who delighted in rocking my parents' suburban world. One year he drew my father into a vehement patio argument over who should win the Nobel Peace Prize. My uncle's nominee--Mao--looked like a piece of pure mischief (Mao's forbearance, he argued, had kept Vietnam from escalating into a world war), while my father's choice, Henry Kissinger, had recently been ratified by the Nobel Committee itself. But three decades later it remains arguable that Mao did restrain the war, while Kissinger--covertly, illegally, and immorally--fomented it, at a cost of tens of thousands of lives, and largely for his own personal political gain.

That he did this, and should be held accountable--in a court of law, as a war criminal--is the issue of The Trials of Henry Kissinger, a documentary based on the similarly titled book by political journalist Christopher Hitchens. According to Hitchens, the arrest of Chilean ex-dictator Augusto Pinochet in London in 1998, and the attempt to charge him with crimes against humanity, left Kissinger nervously wondering whether he might be next. And well he should worry, says Hitchens, who insists that the war criminal epithet "is not a piece of rhetoric, it's not a metaphor--it's a job description." More temperately, The Trials of Henry Kissinger suggests that "in a climate of international justice, a reexamination of Kissinger's career may be in order."

In passing, the film grounds Kissinger's realpolitik in his childhood experience of totalitarian Germany, which inculcated a profoundly gloomy Weltanschauung (his 1957 book, Nuclear War and Foreign Policy, recommended a bomb shelter in every house), a pessimistic and secretive temperament perfectly suited to the cold war, and an amoral belief in the ultimate efficacy of power. The boy on the receiving end of absolute power grows up into a man obsessed with American strength, one who will sacrifice tens of thousands of lives on the altar of national "credibility."

But director Eugene Jarecki doesn't spend much time psychologizing about Kissinger. Instead, the film offers a sober review of charges: that Kissinger sabotaged Vietnam peace negotiations in the waning days of the Johnson administration in order to throw the 1968 election to Nixon and secure himself a political reward; that he conceived the illegal, "secret" bombing of Cambodia, then its 1970 invasion, and finally the overthrow of Prince Sihanouk--events leading directly to the rise of the genocidal Khmer Rouge. All of this to achieve a peace treaty, in 1972, essentially identical to the one he had sabotaged four years earlier. The implication is clear: four years of war, and millions of lives, were the price paid for Kissinger's political aspirations.

As if that weren't enough, there's more. Kissinger, the film conclusively shows, gave the green light to Indonesian dictator Suharto for the 1975 suppression of East Timor, in which a hundred thousand died. And then there's his role in subverting the government of Salvador Allende in Chile. Kissinger vehemently denies any involvement in the execution of General Rene Schneider, an Allende ally who stood in the way of a military coup, but The Trials of Henry Kissinger makes a strong and detailed case otherwise ("He's lying," says our former ambassador to Chile, of Kissinger's denials), and closes with Schneider's son vowing to pursue charges against Kissinger for his father's death.

It's altogether imaginable that Kissinger may have things to worry about in a post-cold-war era of renewed emphasis on international justice. Unsurprisingly, Kissinger has recently written articles warning of "the evils of universal jurisdiction" and its potential for "judicial tyranny." Such positions are self-serving, but also a consistent aspect of his realpolitik, with its frank Nietzschean dismissal of anything as flimsy as an idea of law. The Trials of Henry Kissinger captures its subject's breathtaking contempt for democracy ("I don't know why we should stand by and watch a country go Communist due to the irresponsibility of its people," he says to Nixon and CIA chief Richard Helms after Chile's election of Allende) and his eager accretion to himself of unprecedented power. A quarter-century after the reign of Prince Henry, with the pressure of the cold war lifted, we are free to look back in discomfort at what was done in the name of such things as "American credibility." That this would not be happening except for our triumph over communism invokes a sharp irony: namely, that Kissinger's own victory has damned him, if only--at least for now--in the court of public opinion.

Michael Moore made a name for himself with his 1989 film Roger & Me, in which he pursued General Motors CEO Roger Smith with a few simple questions about his corporation and the sorry state of Moore's impoverished hometown of Flint, Michigan. Establishing himself as every company spokesperson's nightmare, Moore practiced a madcap muckraking that was half Nation magazine, half Mad magazine. The same mix fuels his new movie, Bowling for Columbine. This time it isn't a villain Moore is after, but a syndrome--America's penchant for guns and violence. Why does Japan, despite its addiction to violent video games, suffer just thirty-nine gun-related deaths a year, versus nearly twelve thousand in the United States? Canada has guns and hunters galore, but hardly anyone gets killed there. Why us?

To suss this out, Moore slouches rotundly across America, gabbing with anyone and everyone, offering his longtime membership in the NRA as a show of bona fides. He interviews a blind sportsman enthusing over his M-16; a teenager describing how to make napalm from The Anarchist's Cookbook; a home security representative cheerfully touting family safe rooms; a Lockheed Martin spokesman posed before gigantic missiles, earnestly discussing the importance of anger management for kids in the schools. He visits a bank in a Western state where customers are offered a free hunting rifle for opening an account (he opens one). "Gee," he asks as the smiling bank manager hands over the weapon. "Don't you think it's a little dangerous to be giving this away?" As for his question about American violence, Moore's eventual answer goes like this: our history of racial strife and economic class war has made us an unusually fearful nation--a fearfulness stoked by an incorrigibly sensational "journaltainment" industry, which keeps us percolating in a sense of perpetual threat. In a way, Moore affirms the NRA's mantra. It isn't guns that kill people; it's Americans that kill people.

As a journalist and documentarian, Moore is a curious creature. His reportorial method, with its dogged pursuit of interviewees closing the door in his face, derives from 60 Minutes; his freewheeling cultural criticism is postmodern (his claim, for instance, that the "killer-bee" panic, with its nightmare vision of invading "Africanized" insects, reveals our deep-seated racial fears). As for his politics, behind all the drollery and pop sociology, they are traditional socialist. The United States is a world aggressor; the imbalance between our military and our social spending is shameful; the ills of America stem from racism and unfettered capitalism, the war of all against all. For comparison Moore hops briefly over to Windsor, Ontario, where he goes blundering into people's houses to verify the Canadian boast of not locking their doors ("Thank you for not shooting me," he says to startled residents), and interviews the mayor, who, asked about his city's low crime rate, dilates on health care, retirement subsidies, and antipoverty programs. ("Politicians talk kinda funny in Canada," Moore comments.)

People who can't stand Moore will find plenty to dislike in Bowling for Columbine. There's his insistent mixing of the hilarious and the ominous, his habit of juxtaposing silly absurdities--like the straightfaced deputy describing an accident in which a hunter photographed his dog costumed in camouflage and a propped-up gun which went off, wounding the man--with horrific realities such as slo-mo videotape from a Columbine High security camera of Harris and Klebold wreaking death upon fellow students. And there's his habitual moral grandstanding, as when, in the film's closing moments, he takes a photo of a six-year-old girl killed in a school shooting and leaves it at the house of NRA spokesman Charlton Heston.

If there's an argument for Moore--and I think there is--it's that a cartoonish simplicity can restore perspective, showing us the daily strangeness of life that eludes us, plunked down as we are in the middle of it. People in any society rarely see themselves as clearly as others do; and Moore's pose of innocent inquiry allows him to put forth the sensible questions that a perceptive visitor to this country would ask. Moore's critics on the right dismiss him as an America-hater, and would have him love it or leave it; but in fact, a Moore film is about finding a way to see America from the outside while remaining here, adopting the stance of inner exile that is the sine qua non of intelligent dissent.

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