Peter Foster: Naomi Klein stars in ‘This Misrepresents Everything’

Apart from the stock shots of effluent pipes and belching smokestacks, Naomi Klein’s idea of objectivity concerning the Alberta oilsands is to find a worker ready to blow his nose on the banknote in a Fort McMurray bar.

Scenes like this make Klein’s documentary This Changes Everything, that will air on CBC on Thursday night, not just intellectually vacuous but downright objectionable.

The guy while using currency as nasal tissue could certainly be from a job, not just due to the oil price collapse, but due to the prominent role played by Klein in killing the Keystone XL pipeline and therefore draining billions from the Alberta economy.

Much from the movie, that is based on Klein’s endless book of the same name, takes the type of a number of confrontations between residents plus some type of development: the oilsands in Alberta; pipelines, coal and shale in Montana and Wyoming; a coal-fired electricity plant in India; a goldmine in Greece; killer smog in Beijing.

The propaganda sequence runs roughly: riot, teargas (not necessary in Beijing), shots of individuals running and screaming, rinse and repeat.

This is not to suggest that consultation with local communities is not required, but situations are in fact not quite as simple as presented. In Kleinworld, agitation is usually organized by multinational environmental NGOs with an anti-development agenda and little if any concern for local people’s welfare. Meanwhile it takes considerable chutzpah to suggest that Greece’s problems might be based on any version of capitalism.

No thought is obviously provided to the machine that produced the bottles of San Pellegrino or even the watermelon

The wobbly intellectual substructure to Klein’s catalogue of capitalist crimes may be the system’s alleged belief that Nature can there be to be raped and pillaged, which resources are infinite. The film never presents anyone who actually holds this view because, like most of Klein’s claims, it’s demonic nonsense.

Klein’s evil capitalist clincher is, obviously, global warming, which is epitomized by Superstorm Sandy. But that storm can by no means shape or form be laid at the door of man-made global warming.

It is ironic indeed that early on in the film Klein attends a meeting of the British Royal Society – home of Newton and Darwin – because the supposed epicentre of the scientific assault on spirituality. The meeting would be to discuss geoengineering as a means to fix climate change (“pollution to battle pollution”). But while you will find indeed many questions about such schemes, the implication that the Royal Society is a bastion of objectivity, particularly when you are looking at climate, is almost satirical. Indeed several recent presidents of the society go off the reservation when it comes to the climate issue and have needed to be reined in by their own members.

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The movie, which was directed by Klein’s husband Avi Lewis, scion of one of Canada’s most prominently canting socialist families, is outstanding only for its perspective-free hypocrisy.

Take the posturing of Crystal Lameman of the Beaver Lake Cree, who reside in the vicinity of the oilsands. Lameman, who will later appear delivering a speech to a mob in Washington, spouts fortune-cookie mysticism about the land owning the people rather than the other way round. However the arresting point is that she’s doing this while dressed and made up in very non-traditional fashion, against the backdrop of her modern kitchen, using its Ikea cabinetry, brushed-steel faucets and modern appliances. Then Crystal is seen driving her Kia to a Michael-Moore-style non-confrontation in a spill site, which she knows she’ll not be permitted to enter. Crystal, like Naomi, presumably did not reach Washington by magic carpet. She also uses a phone, which definitely wasn’t produced by “traditional knowledge.”

At a Beaver Cree band barbecue, no thought is obviously provided to the machine that produced the bottles of San Pellegrino or the watermelon the child being conspicuously coddled by Klein is eating. The height of hypocrisy is reached when it is revealed that the Beaver Cree are suing the government of Canada because oilsands development has “made traditional life impossible.”

Apparently undesirable too.

The film gets really intriguing when the credits start to roll, and people who supported this pile of agitprop are identified. Chief included in this is one thing called the Sustainable Markets Foundation, SMF. Since it’s all the rage these days to bemoan “Dark Money,” the title of Jane Mayer’s hatchet job on the Koch Brothers (Mayer was interviewed on the CBC’s The Current now), it’s worth noting that the SMF was highlighted in a report by a U.S. Senate committee as an up-and-coming node of a progressive “Billionaires Club” full of capitalist foundations that despise markets.

“Can I be truthful with you?” Klein asks at the outset of this very dishonest film. “I’ve always kind of hated films about climate change – What are the possibilities to be bored by the end of the planet?”

No, Naomi, but it’s easy to be bored by individuals who prattle incessantly that the end around the globe is imminent if this isn’t, and who wish to end the very best world we’ve ever had.