Bowling at capitalism — Socialist Resistance newspaper

Bowling at capitalism

Socialist Resistance no1 | page 22

This is scanned newsprint, not web text. The original PDFs carried no text layer at all, so every word here was read off the page by OCR. Expect dropped opening letters, run-together words and wrong characters. There was no contents page to cut the paper up by, so the articles were found from the size of their headlines: a headline may carry its kicker, and where an article ran beside a boxed panel a few lines of the neighbour can appear. The scanned issue is the authority; this text is here so the words can be found at all.

Bowling for Columbine, written, produced and directed by Michael Moore the murderous record of US governments since the Second World War: Iran 1953, Guatemala 1954, Vietnam 1963, Chile 1973, El Salvador etc. etc.

This sequence culminates with the remark that Bin Laden put into practice on 11 September what the US had trained him for. Given the bigoted and intolerant climate that has been whipped up in the USA today, this is indeed a courageous statement.

But Moore has not finished. In one of the best sections, we are treated to a brief history of America.

Amazingly its subject

matter, it is truly hilarious. Its argument is also bold and politically incisive. The American's right to carry arms, defended by the pro-gun lobby, was rooted in the need for the white slave-owners to arm themselves against rebelThe US gun culture is linked to racism and the idea of white supremaIs it a coincidence, Moore •• asks, that the Klu Klux Klan starts at