The War on Democracy [DVD]

Since watching John Pilger's first DVD collection, I have been eagerly waiting for this cinema documentary, The War On Democracy, to be released on DVD as well. I have just finished watching it several times, and while this film is not without its weak points, I can honestly say the wait has been worth it.

I got my money's worth during Pilger's confrontation with a former CIA chief, whose arrogance concerning the loss of innocent lives in Latin America is shocking, no matter how many times you watch it. When was the last time you saw a journalist (any journalist!) confront the CIA face-to face and demand to know: 'What right do you have to overthrow other countries' governments?'. Pilger does exactly that in this movie, and for me, this DVD paid for itself in those few moments alone.

There is stunning photography of the South American landscape in this film as well, the sheer beauty of which takes your breath away, and interviews with common people in Latin America whose courage is nothing short of inspiring. In one emotional scene, a priest in Bolivia breaks down and cries on camera as he remembers the government's massacre of innocent people. In another segment, we hear the horrific testimony of an American nun who was abducted and tortured in Guatemala in the late 1980s -- torture that she says was overseen by a fellow United States citizen. These are stories of common people that must be told, and yet the mainstream media companies whose so-called 'news' we watch, read and listen to every day continue to treat such people as invisible or as untouchables. Again, Pilger does a great public service in sharing their stories with us.

The weak points that I found in this movie concern Chile in particular. Why was there no mention in this film, for example, of the recent election of Michelle Bachelet, the first woman president of Chile? While Bachelet, a victim of torture herself under the brutal Pinochet regime, is admittedly not perfect, she surely represents a great leap forward from the dark days of 'the repression'. Yet she is not even mentioned in this film.

Also, Pilger makes one glaring mistake in this film (and on his website, which I checked) in reporting that the great Chilean balladeer Victor Jara was tortured and executed in the open-air National Stadium of Chile, which Pilger walks us through in this movie. Victor Jara, rather, saw his last days in Estadio Chile (Chile Stadium) a much smaller, indoor facility located in downtown Santiago, Chile. Thanks to efforts by Joan Jara, Victor's British widow, the name of the stadium where Victor was tortured and killed by Pinochet's thugs in 1973 is officially known today as Victor Jara Stadium. It was a bit disappointing to see that Pilger, who is usually quite accurate in his reporting, had not double-checked his facts on this point.

However, all things said, these weaknesses do not detract from what is overall a very powerful, very emotionally moving documentary. Pilger is correct in noting the trend of Latin American countries in rising up to face 'the empire' (as Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez refers to the U.S. in this film). Indeed, as we speak, more South American countries are rising up and will continue to rise up. If we are to understand more clearly how global imperial history is changing right before our eyes, we need more documentary films like this one -- and more brave journalists like John Pilger to help tell us the truth.

I watched this documentary on TV recently, and I have to say it was simply one of the best programs I have ever had the priviledge to see. John Pilger's gift is to take the truth and hold it up to your face so starkly that only a moron or corrupt politician could fail to be moved. Indeed I was almost moved to tears by parts of the program, and also angered that so much evil, and that's not too strong a word, is being done in our name by governments who drip feed us pap and misinformation.

I have been watching DVDs of Noam Chomsky recently too, and he tells of similar injustices meted out by the West on those less fortunate. I would urge everyone with a conscience to wake the hell up, stop watching SKY news which re-runs trivia every 15 minutes, and look around you. I have even started watching Al Jazeera for the news, and it has so much more depth and scope to proper issues that it boggles the mind. One of the major points Pilger makes is that the media are privately owned, and the garbage we get fed to us is simply to mis-inform and lie to us. Your government is lying to you every day people!

Pilger's books and documentaries dont make for a comfortable evening's viewing or reading. He strips away the facade of our supposed decency in the West and makes us examine the true extent of our leaders' underhand, duplicitous and evil doings in the name of supposed "democracy". It's all a lie, and as any history student will tell you, if you tell a big enough lie, people will believe it.

Hugo Chavez comes across as a good, decent well-intentioned man. He speaks with humility and good grace. Compare that with the lying, draft-dodging, incompetent, war-mongering, ingrate currently residing in the Whitehouse. Christ! The times they are a-changing.

"You use virtually any method necessary to get what you want", asserts Major Joseph Blair, instructor in the early 1980s at the School of the Americas, Georgia, where the military personnel of US-sponsored Latin American dictatorships were "taught interrogation and torture techniques", the manuals now in the public domain.

"Torture?" asks Pilger.

"And killing. If there's someone you don't want, you kill them ... you assassinate them with one of your death squads."

From the gunning down of unarmed mourners at a funeral in El Salvador, through the US-backed campaign against the indigenous Mayan people of Guatemala (described by the United Nations as 'genocide'), the systematic massacre in one Salvadorian village of at least 200 defenceless women and children ("You could hear their screams for their mothers and fathers", testifies a survivor), to the gang rape of nuns orchestrated by a man identified as an American national in Guatemala's torture chambers, John Pilger's well researched narrative documents the United States' rampage, through its clients and proxies, of subversion, suppression, plunder, and murder throughout the Latin American continent since 1945, brutally overthrowing democratically elected governments in Guatemala, Venezuela, Chile, Nicaragua, and elsewhere.

"Is that OK to overthrow a democratically elected government?" asks Pilger of Duane Clarridge, head of the CIA's Latin American division in the early 1980s.

"It depends on what your national security interests are", comes Clarridge's response.

Questioned on the carnage wrought on the civilian populations of America's client dictatorships in Latin America, Clarridge peremptorily replies: "That's just tough ... and if you don't like it, lump it. Get used to it, world ... if our interests are threatened, we're gonna do it". And what are those interests? The US-sponsored coup to oust Chavez as President of oil-rich Venezuela rehearses a typical story: read 'economic interests', 'security' a code word for rapacious greed by the large corporations who, it becomes clear (but have we ever doubted it? presidential candidate Ron Paul indeed made it a platform of his 2008 campaign), effectively own the US government.

Challenging George W. Bush's assessment in the wake of 9/11 that the US was attacked because "they hate our freedoms", Osama bin Laden poignantly retorted: "Let him tell us why we did not strike Sweden, for example." For it has rather been a succession of US administrations, hand-in-glove with powerful monied elites, who have ruthlessly demonstrated beyond question a hatred of freedom, a hatred of democracy, a contempt for human rights and human dignity, where these conflict with America's economic "interests".

Sister Dianna Ortiz, an America nun and missionary who survived torture and gang-rape by the military in Guatemala, reflects painfully on her own experiences in 1989: "I've heard people say that what happened in Abu Ghraib is an isolated incident, and I have to just shake my head and say, 'Are we on the same planet? Aren't you aware of our history? Isn't history taught in the classroom?'" John Pilger's courageous and shocking film, The War On Democracy, should unquestionably be on that History curriculum.