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As of the time of publishing this blog post, you’ll have about an hour and a half to answer our fearsomely difficult question: In what year was This Magazine founded? Leave your comment below!

Make sure you use either your real email address (no one will see it but us, and we won’t spam you later, promise), or a Twitter or Facebook login, so that we can contact you if you win. Good luck!

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.

Tell us your favourite Joy Division song to win two tickets to Friday's screening of "Joy Division" from Images Festival.

Our friends at Images Festival have very nicely given us two passes to the screening of Grant Gee’s documentary Joy Division, screening this Friday, February 5, 2010 in Toronto. So, in order to make sure the swag goes to a true JD fan, we’re asking you to leave a comment below naming your favourite Joy Division song. We’ll collect all the entries and pick someone at random to get the tickets. The Guardian called the documentary “a must-see” in their 2007 review:

This is a very powerful and moving film that perhaps goes deeper than Control in exploring the full reasons for [Ian] Curtis’s suicide…. There are no actors or recreations. There are no twists for dramatic effect. It’s all vividly real. […] Two full days after seeing Joy Division, the documentary, it’s difficult to shake off the impact of some of the interviews, or the feeling that this story is ongoing, in all of us, in the lives of people left behind, many of whom are only starting to understand what happened with the benefit of age and experience.

We’ve seen it, by the way, and it is every bit as fantastic as it sounds. And now you can see it on us! Click through to leave your comment and enter. The Rules:

1. To enter, leave a comment below naming your favourite Joy Division song.
2. One entry per person — in other words, multiple comments don’t get you more chances to win. That said, feel free to advocate for your song or convince others of its awesomeness. Banter!
3. The draw will close on Thursday, February 4, 2010, at noon, EST. We’ll draw the winner Thursday afternoon.
4. Make sure we have a way of contacting you — in other words, sign in with Twitter or Facebook, or make sure you leave your real email address (which won’t be visible to, or shared, with anyone else!)

The Islamic punk music scene would never have existed if it weren’t for his 2003 novel, The Taqwacores. Melding the Arabic word for god-consciousness with the edge of hardcore punk, Michael imagined a community of Muslim radicals: Mohawked Sufis, riot grrrls in burqas with band patches, skinhead Shi’as. These characters were entirely fictional.

But the movement they inspired is very real.

Taqwacore: The Birth of Punk Islam follows Michael and his real-life kindred spirits on their first U.S. tour, where they incite a riot of young hijabi girls at the largest Muslim gathering in North America after Sena takes the stage. The film then travels with them to Pakistan, where members of the first Taqwacore band, The Kominas, bring punk to the streets of Lahore and Michael begins to reconcile his fundamentalist past with the rebel he has now become.

By stoking the revolution—against traditionalists in their own communities and against the clichés forced upon them from the outside—“we’re giving the finger to both sides,” says one Taqwacore. “Fuck you and fuck you.”

Sounds to me like a much-needed retort to the kind of reductive, ridiculous, or racist (or all three!) portrayals of Muslims in Western pop culture. Can’t wait to see it. Taqwacore plays this weekend in Toronto, and opens in Montreal on Monday.

Leila’s Birthday — playing as part of the Toronto Palestine Film Festival, Friday Oct. 2nd Bloor Cinema at 7:00 PM

While most Torontonians know about TIFF—the hugely publicized Toronto International Film Festival—very few have heard about TPFF, the Toronto Palestine Film Festival. Unlike TIFF, the TPFF isn’t attended by Hollywood stars, doesn’t receive much mainstream media coverage and has no paid staff.

Despite these challenges, TPFF is an ambitious film fest that features over 40 films and documentaries about Palestine and the Palestinian Diaspora. By showcasing the diversity of Palestinian culture and people, the film fest attempts to dispel stereotypes of the victimized or violent Palestinian.

According to Dalia Majid, a TPFF spokesperson the aim of the festival is “to support Palestinian filmmakers and artists, because they often face major challenges in getting their films made and screened.” Another aim is to showcase “Palestinian culture, aspirations, humour, satire—the range of emotions all people feel, including Palestinians.”

Some festival highlights include the Canadian premiere of Amreeka, the North American premiere of To My Father (Tuesday, September 29, 7:00 PM), Checkpoint Rock: Songs of Palestine (Wednesday, September 30, 7:00 PM), and Laila’s Birthday (Friday, October 2, 7:00 PM), a film screened at last year’s TIFF. This year’s festival also includes an art exhibit, three discussion forums, a film and food brunch program, and will be attended by seven directors.

Majid says that the response so far “has been very positive. Last year people attended the film fest out of curiosity and left very impressed. We have big expectations for this year’s film fest.”

When asked whether the TPFF has an official position regarding the controversy that raged at TIFF this year, Majid explains that the TPFF has “welcomed the discussion that followed the petition and boycott” because “at the very least it got people talking,” which she said was better than silence and indifference.

The second annual TPFF started last Friday and ends this Friday, October 2. The programming guide is available at the fest’s website.

View (slightly altered!) from Sacred Sueños, outside Vilcabamba, Ecuador. Read Jenn Hardy's cover story on permaculture in the July-August 2009 issue of This Magazine.

The July-August issue of This Magazine is now in subscribers’ mailboxes (subscribers always get the magazine early, and you can too), and will be for sale on better newsstands coast-to-coast this week. Two pieces from the issue are already online: Jenn Hardy‘s cover story on the new generation of farmers using the principles of permaculture to radically reshape our food system; and Navneet Alang‘s column on emergent “real-time citizenship” on the web. Everything else will gradually trickle online in the weeks ahead, so keep checking back for more. You can subscribe to our RSS feed to ensure you never miss a new article going online, or follow us on Twitter for updates and links to new content.

Here are some of the other features you’ll find in the July-August issue: Dawn Paley writes from the Cauca Valley, Colombia, about the plight of sugar-plantation workers there, and the Canada-Colombia Free Trade Agreement that threatens their already tenuous working conditions. Morgan Dunlop‘s feature on modern church sanctuary tells the story of three Canadian church congregations who took in refugees whom Immigration Canada wanted deported, and the larger fight for a more just and humane refugee system in this country.

There’s more: Paul McLaughlin interviews Gordon Graff, the archictecture student who proposes a 59-storey “SkyFarm” for downtown Toronto, which he says could feed 40,000 people; Craig Saunders finds that Environment Canada appears to be muzzling its own researchers; Adel Iskandar asks the CRTC to finally bring Al Jazeera to Canadian airwaves; Veronica Islas parties with Ottawa’s Gay Guerilla Takeover;  Andrea McDowell has strong feelings about Wind Turbine Syndrome; Nick Taylor-Vaisey surveys the recession’s effects on Canadian arts and culture; Elaisha Stokes sends a postcard from Lusaka, Zambia, about new anti-smoking laws that have locals lighting up in strange places; Bruce M. Hicks finds the Green Party of Canada skewing electoral strategies for every party, left and right; books columnist Darryl Whetter on creative-writing masters degrees; Dorothy Woodend on exploitation, documentary, and Jackass; Sean Michaels profiles the “conceptual comedy” duo Life of a Craphead; and returning economics columnist Ellen Russell dismantles the rhetoric around so-called “big government.”

PLUS: a new short story by Elisabeth de Mariaffi; new poems by Kathryn Mockler; Erica Butler on urban chickens; Rosemary Counter on electronic cigarettes; Anna Bowen on what stimulus dollars are buying; editor Graham F. Scott on applying Canadian law abroad; Graham Lanktree on electronic musician Tim Hecker; Terese Saplys on Nicole Brossard’s latest novel, Fences in Breathing; and an expanded letters section with your feedback on our May-June cover story on nuclear power.

Before my son Louis could walk, he could surf. He took to the internet like an aquatic creature, swimming easily and confidently. It was cute to see him perched at the computer, his big baby head topped off by a pair of giant headphones. But his avidity made me uneasy, a disquiet that lingers still, when I hover over his shoulder trying to see what he’s watching, making, understanding.

Generations see screens differently. Illustration by Dave Donald

I come from a generation of watchers — of movies, of TV — but Lou belongs to a generation of makers. Even though he’s only seven years old, already he’s leaving me behind, moving from consumer to creator, making and posting videos of his Lego men, swimming in a vast sea of video clips, remixes, parodies. To him, culture isn’t a static thing to be passively imbibed, but something to act upon; not an inviolate product, but simply material. As much as I admire the next generation’s digital fluidity, I miss the bigger picture — something that isn’t cut up, sliced into bits and pieces. More importantly, I worry that Lou will miss it also.

The break between the emerging culture of the empowered creator and the old-fashioned passive consumer is the subject of Brett Gaylor’s award-winning documentary RiP: A Remix Manifesto. RiP picked up the 2008 Dioraphte Audience Award at the International Documentary Festival Amsterdam and is being released this spring online and in theatres. The subject of the film is how current intellectual property laws affect the culture being made by a new generation. The copyright debate is something of a Wild West show at the moment, and no one embodies that spirit more fully than a musician named Gregg Gillis, who records and releases under the name Girl Talk. Gillis combines hundreds of samples from other artists’ songs into mashups, and in so doing, risks lawsuits, prison time, and massive fines. The film uses Girl Talk as a test case for current copyright laws, but also poses fundamental questions about how new forms of culture always need to build, borrow, or outright steal from the past.

In one of the film’s more thought-provoking segments, Lawrence Lessig, the Stanford law professor and founder of Creative Commons, argues that overreaching copyright laws have strangled creativity and eaten away at the public domain in the name of money and control. Despite lawsuits and penalties, people continue to rip, remix, and sample with gusto. After all, Lessig argues, the desire to play along is a natural form of creativity. And to punish or outlaw such a manifestation is tantamount to creating a generation with no respect for the law. (Lessig’s talk, included in the film, is available online at ted.com.)

I think Lessig is right about the importance of sharing ideas, but my misgivings linger — not just about how material is used, but how it’s perceived. It’s not because I’m afraid Louis will get sued one day. It’s because when films are simply something to be cut up, reworked, made into goofy commentary, and viewed ironically, I think something is lost. The ability to follow a sustained narrative has been fundamental to human nature, but it’s been so fractured, so chopped into small pieces, that it sometimes seems in danger of disappearing.

Louis informed me the other day that YouTube was better than TV and movies because you could watch whatever you wanted, and no one made you watch something (like ads) that you didn’t want to see. Here I am in danger of dating myself terribly, but this makes me think about how the medium carries the meaning. I am reminded of what it once was to listen to records. The A- and B-sides, the sequential tracks, formed a journey — and to interrupt this process was to miss the larger impact. You were meant to move in a linear fashion, from beginning to end.

That straight-line mentality has been disrupted, and not simply because there is often no top or bottom, no beginning or end, on the internet. When the larger arc is missing, the fundamental nature of story can change, becoming smaller and less affecting.

But the loss of the experience of sitting quietly in a darkened theatre to watch a movie — something I still love, but can’t truly share with my son — makes me sad. My experience has been shared by countless parents, who watch their children launch into some new world we can only fleetingly grasp. All we can do is wave goodbye from the shore, as they swim away.

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.