THE WAR ON DEMOCRACY - a powerful new documentary from legendary film-maker John Pilger is out now in UK cinemas.
Cert 12A - 98mins
Currently showing at cinemas across the UK in July, August and September
Check with John Pilgers website for more info - NB dates listed are the w/c Friday dates - check with cinemas for screening dates and start times
JOHN PILGERS SITE
WHAT THE PRESS ARE SAYING
Film Of The Week - TIME OUT"
"A MUST SEE" London Evening Standard"
"THE ULTIMATE ANTI-BLOCKBUSTER... IRRESISTIBLE" The Times
"EXCELLENT" The Guardian
"INCENDIARY" Total Film
"THIS IS A GENUINELY FASCINATING EXPOSE OF US FOREIGN POLICY, AND HIGHLY RECOMMENDED" Bizzare Magazine
"A POWERFUL PIECE" 4/5 Film Review
"EXTRAORDINARY... GRIPPING VIEWING" 4/5 Empire Magazine
The War on Democracy
'The War on Democracy' is award-winning writer/director John Pilger's first major film for the cinema…in a career that has produced more than 55 television documentaries. Set in Latin America and the US, it explores the historic and current relationship of Washington with countries such as Venezuela, Bolivia and Chile.
"The film tells a universal story," says Pilger, "analysing and revealing, through vivid testimony, the story of great power behind its venerable myths. It allows us to understand the true nature of the so-called war on terror".
John Pilger has made some of the most celebrated documentaries ever shown. He has won television academy awards on both sides of the Atlantic, an American ‘EMMY’ and a British ‘BAFTA’ for a lifetime’s distinction in factual television. His first film, made in 1970, ‘The Quiet Mutiny’, had an extraordinary impact when it revealed that the US military in Vietnam was in open revolt and the war was unwinnable. His 1979 film, ‘Year Zero’ is credited with alerting much of the world to the suffering of Cambodia under Pol Pot. His 1994 film, ‘Death of a Nation’, similarly brought the suffering of the East Timorese people to a worldwide audience for the first time. His last film, “Stealing a Nation” (2004) won the Royal Television Society Award for Best Documentary. His 2003 film “Breaking the Silence; Truth and Lies in the War on Terror” is credited as the inspiration for Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11.
In addition, he has twice won British journalism’s highest award, that of Journalist of the Year, for his work all over the world, notably in Cambodia and Vietnam. He has been International Reporter of the Year and holds the United Nations Association Media Peace Prize. In 2003 he was awarded the prestigious Sophie Prize for ‘thirty years of exposing deception and improving human rights’.
“John Pilger unearths, with steely attention to facts, the filthy truth and tells it as it is. I salute him.” Harold Pinter, 2005 Nobel Prizewinner
SYNOPSIS
In his second inauguration address, President Bush pledged to ‘bring democracy to the world’. In his speech he mentioned the words ‘democracy’ and ‘liberty’ 21 times. Most of the world, it is fair to say, will have recoiled, many in fear. Bush’s speech was significant because it finally stripped noble concepts like ‘democracy’ of their true meaning – government, for, by and of the people.
This film explores the theme of disenchantment with democracy, concentrating on those parts of the world where people have struggled with blood, sweat and tears to plant democracy, only to see it brutally crushed.
Pilger filmed in the US, where he conducted illuminating and shocking interviews with a number of renegade CIA agents who took part in secret campaigns against democratic countries and who today are profiting from the war in Iraq.
He investigated, through undercover filming, the ‘School of Americas’ in Georgia, USA. General Pinochet’s torture squads were trained in this secretive place, along with tyrants and death-squad leaders of Haiti, El Salvador, Brazil, Argentina, indeed every Latin American country where democracy was annihilated by the graduates of this ‘school’ where torture classes were held…the blueprints for Guantanamo Bay.
Archive footage demonstrates how democracy has been wiped out in country after country in Latin America since the 1950s. Carl Deal, chief archivist on both ‘Fahrenheit 9/11’ and Moore’s previous film, ‘Bowling for Colombine’, brings his talents to Pilger’s ‘The War on Democracy’.
“In one hour, Cambodia Year Zero laid bare astonishing facts with such skill and power it was impossible to get up and leave the preview theatre” The Times.
The film contains moving testimonies from those who fought and suffered for democracy – in Chile and Bolivia.
Pilger travelled through Venezuela with its president, Hugo Chavez, the only leader of an oil-producing nation who has used its resources democratically - for the education and health of its people. Despite being toppled from his presidency in 2002 by rich and powerful interests backed by the US, he was brought back to power by the sheer weight of Venezuelan people power. The film has a positive element; great power is not invincible.
Filming in the Andean country of Bolivia shows that for the last five years huge popular movements have demanded that multinational companies be refused to access the country’s natural reserves of gas, or to buy up the water supply.
Q & A with John Pilger
What is the history of the film?
I wanted to make a film on Venezuela six years ago, but Latin America was then not regarded as ‘interesting enough’. That’s all changed, of course. The rise of Hugo Chavez and of the social movements that produced him and Evo Morales in Bolivia, and their equivalents throughout the continent, has demanded our attention. It’s such a positive, optimistic story that contrasts with the bleak view of the world regarded as ‘mainstream’. I’ve long regarded Latin America as the source of hopes of freedom from poverty for the very poor, and the current, extraordinary rising of millions against the old order is defying all the stereotypes. For one thing, it’s democratic in a way we’ve forgotten or abandoned in the west; for all the media concentration on Chavez, the grassroots movement of the ‘invisible people’ in Venezuela and elsewhere is true ‘big story’. For example, in Bolivia, the poorest country on the continent, the indigenous majority long despised by the European elites have developed a form of communal democracy that deals directly with big issues that might seem abstract to us in the West, such as the theft of natural resources – like gas and water – by rapacious foreign corporations. For most of the filming I simply listened to ordinary people saying extraordinary things: offering the kind of economic critiques you rarely here in the West and solutions. It was humbling for me.
Why did you decide to make this particular film for the cinema?
When you see a powerful film expressed on the big screen, in High Definition and wrapped in Dolby sound, there is nothing quite like the experience. Think back to ‘Motorcycle Diaries’ and how moving, humane and panoramic that was. Think back to the black-and-white era and the sheer power of ‘The Grapes of Wrath’; that’s the power of cinema. Of course, television has its own distinct power, reaching millions of people in one sitting. For me, the two are complementary. The War on Democracy film is for both cinema and TV and will go to air on the ITV network. Michael Watt’s backing allowed my fellow director Chris Martin and me to ‘recce’ the shoot thoroughly, then gave us the luxury of shooting with two distinguished (and very different) cinematographers Preston Clothier and Rupert Binsley, and of collaborating with Carl Deal, the brilliant archivist who made so much of Michael Moore’s films work.
What makes you think a wide audience is interested in events in far-off Latin America?
The timing of our film couldn’t be better, for it’s about empire and the enduring project to control people’s lives and resources—all of which is the unspoken message of the news every day. Modern empire began in Latin America more than 500 years ago and the struggle of ordinary people to free themselves from the enslavement of poverty and racism has changed only in form and degree. Since the mid-19th century, Latin America has been the ‘backyard’ of the United States: a collection of mostly vassal states whose compliant and often brutalised regimes have reinforced the ‘invisibility’ of their majority peoples. In other words, modern Latin America, its struggles, hopes and dreams, is a metaphor for the struggles, hopes and dreams of human beings everywhere.
How do you deal with the role and power of the United States?
Much of the film is set in the United States where my interviews with, for example, Duane Clarridge, who ran the CIA in Latin America in the 1980s, are revealing not only about then, but about now. Substitute Iraq and Iran and Lebanon, and you’ll see what I mean. I have no doubt an audience will understand Mr. Clarridge’s message when he looks at me and says, ‘Like it or lump it.’
What do you want the film to achieve?
If it helps people to make some sense of the political world in which they live, if it helps them de-code ‘our’ propaganda in the West and think more critically about the nature of democracy and its subversion, The War on Democracy will have achieved its aim.
Why are people interested in documentary features like this?
They are more than ‘interested’. I believe they want to see them, urgently. Look at the surveys of what people want from television and cinema. Yes, they want escapist films and TV programmes; but there’s another need they express over and again. And that comes down to making sense of a world so often presented to them as an assembly line of apparently surreal, unrelated images. That’s why Michael Moore has been successful, why Morgan Spurlock’s ‘Supersize Me’ was such a hit. When ‘Death of a Nation’, my film on the genocide in a faraway place few had heard of, called East Timor, was shown, British Telecom reported 4,000 calls a minute to Carlton Television from viewers in the hour following transmission. When Chris Martin and I made ‘Stealing a Nation’, about the secret expulsion of the Chagos Islanders by the British government in order to give their country to the Americans for a military base, we struck a seam of public interest that follows this film wherever it is shown in the world. Why? Because it explains what’s going on, not from the point of view of those in power.
What’s the most important element in the actual making of a film like The War on Democracy?
The teamwork, whether it’s the talent of the editor Joe Frost that of the other producers, David Blake, Asif Ismail and David Boardman. It’s especially the partnership between Chris Martin and me. It’s a joy to work with Chris. We complement each other in so many ways. Without that empathy (and a shared black sense of humour) the film-making simply wouldn’t work.
Looking back over your career, what are your most vivid memories?
That’s difficult to answer, though two surreal episodes stand out. They both have to do with the manipulation and abuse of power. The first was in the early summer of 1968 when I was based as a correspondent in the United States. I had been traveling for almost three weeks with Bobby Kennedy, who had seized the opportunity of President Lyndon Johnson’s resignation over Vietnam and the growing anti-war movement led by another Democrat, Senator Eugene McCarthy. On 2 June, I sat opposite Kennedy in his campaign plane as it headed for California where the vote in the vital California primary would take place the next day. It was the last long interview he would give. On June 4 , as he celebrated his victory in the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, he was shot in front of me, and he died the next day. This was politics by assassination. Kennedy would have gone on to be elected President, there is no doubt. What would have changed? There would have been no President Nixon, no Watergate and, some say, he would have ended the war. I dispute the latter. Like his murdered brother, his liberalism raised hopes but masked the true promise of business-as-usual.
And the second episode?
It was 1979; I arrived in Cambodia in the wake of the fall of Pol Pot’s genocidal Khmer Rouge, the makers of ‘Year Zero’. In the silent humidity, Phnom Penh, the capital, looked as if it had been struck by a nuclear cataclysm that had decimated the population and spared the buildings. Houses, apartments, office blocks, schools, hotels stood empty and open. Personal possessions lay trampled, the traffic lights jammed on red. When the monsoon broke, the gutters filled with money. The streets ran with money, much of it in new banknotes that flowed out of the national bank which the Khmer Rouge had blown up as they retreated before the Vietnamese. In a ruined Esso petrol station an old woman and three emaciated children squatted around a pot containing a mixture of roots and leaves, which bubbled over a fire fuelled with paper money: thousands of snapping, cracking, worthless money: such a grotesque irony, for these were people in need of everything money no longer could buy.
Did your film, ‘Cambodia Year Zero’, change anything?
Well, it raised, unsolicited, some $40 million, most of it given by viewers with next to nothing themselves: a lesson in itself. This went straight to Cambodia to help the thousands of orphaned children. I hope the film had a more wide-reaching, political effect, reminding people in the west that the awful Pol Pot and his medieval movement had risen out of the carnage of years of American bombing.
Will The War on Democracy have a similar impact?
Again, I trust it will inform and enlighten many people. Although it’s a serious story, it will also entertain, as a movie should, and I believe it will touch many. Just listen to the music. Listen to the thrilling voice of the great Venezuelan balladeer Ali Primera and the deeply moving song from the heart of Chile’s Victor Jara, murdered by Pinochet, and just try and keep a dry eye when the great Sam Cooke sings ‘A Change is Gonna Come’, as though it’s an anthem, and a truth, which it is.
Chris Martin’s Director’s Statement - The People and their Power
The film was shot in Venezuela, Bolivia, Chile, Miami and Washington DC.
A unique interview was shot with Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, with Pilger and I travelling with Chavez and his presidential entourage around the country. Chavez and his supporters have been elected democratically by the Venezuelan people eleven times in 10 years. In the December 2006 election Chavez won a landslide in the greatest turnout in Venezuela’s history.
Interviews were filmed with Chavez supporters and detractors, from rich Venezuelans to the poorest of people in the barrios, plus leading TV journalists and historians. Pilger describes the advances in Venezuela’s new social democracy, but he also questions Chavez on why there are still poor people in such an oil-rich country. The film shows, with irony, that in the country now abused and vilified in the West as ‘another Cuba’, capitalism has never had it better.
The Venezuelan segment of the film features the coup of 2002, captured in real time from very revealing archival footage, supported by remarkable documents released under freedom of information which reveals the covert involvement of the US Government in the affairs of the Venezuelan nation.
In Bolivia Pilger interviews people who tell how their country was asset stripped – effectively sold off – to multinational interests including their water; even rainwater was sold. Pilger describes how they threw out a foreign water consortium and reclaimed the water. The narrative leads to the landslide election of the first ever indigenous President.
In Chile Pilger talks to women who survived the pogroms of General Pinochet, in sad remembrance of colleagues who perished at the hands of the dictator. In one of the most moving scenes, he walks with Sara de Witt through the grounds of the torture house where she was tortured and where she remarkably survived. He investigates the ‘model democracy’ that Chile has become and looks behind the façade of prosperity and calm to find Pinochet’s legacy very much alive.
An American nun, Dianna Ortiz, reveals how she was tortured and gang raped in the late 80s by a gang led by a fellow American clearly in league with the US-backed regime. At that time, the Reagan administration was supplying the military regime with planes and guns. One of the most brazen witnesses is the former infamous CIA man and Watergate conspirator Howard Hunt who describes how he and others overthrew the previously democratically elected government. Hunt describes how he organised ‘a little harmless bombing’. Today, Dianna Ortiz asks whether the American people are aware of the role their country plays in subverting innocent nations under the guise of a ‘war on terror’.
Perhaps the most revealing and, in many ways, entertaining interviews of the film is that which Pilger conducts with Duane Clarridge, former head of CIA operations in South America, who openly and angrily admits and celebrates America’s right to do what they want anywhere in the world and to anyone, regardless of their innocence – as long as it’s in America’s national interest. ‘Like it or lump it,’ he says.
Throughout the film the theme of empire is investigated and stripped of its semantic masks such as ‘democracy building’. The film’s message is that the greed and power of empire is not invincible and that people power is always the ‘seed beneath the snow’.
JOHN PILGER WRITES ON HUGO CHAVEZ IN
THE GUARDIAN 13TH MAY 2006
I have spent the past three weeks filming in the hillside barrios of Caracas, in streets and breeze-block houses that defy gravity and torrential rain and emerge at night like fireflies in the fog.
Caracas is said to be one of the world's toughest cities, yet I have known no fear; the poorest have welcomed my colleagues and me with a warmth characteristic of ordinary Venezuelans but also with the unmistakable confidence of a people who know that change is possible and who, in their everyday lives, are reclaiming noble concepts long emptied of their meaning in the west: "reform", "popular democracy", "equity", "social justice" and, yes, "freedom".
The other night, in a room bare except for a single fluorescent tube, I heard these words spoken by the likes of Ana Lucia Fernandez, aged 86, Celedonia Oviedo, aged 74, and Mavis Mendez, aged 95. A mere 33-year-old, Sonia Alvarez, had come with her two young children. Until about a year ago, none of them could read and write; now they are studying mathematics. For the first time in its modern era, Venezuela has almost 100% literacy. This achievement is due to a national programme, called Mision Robinson, designed for adults and teenagers previously denied an education because of poverty. Mision Ribas is giving everyone a secondary school education, called a bachillerato. (The names Robinson and Ribas refer to Venezuelan independence leaders from the 19th century.) Named, like much else here, after the great liberator Simon Bolivar, "Bolivarian", or people's, universities have opened, introducing, as one parent told me, "treasures of the mind, history and music and art, we barely knew existed".
Under Hugo Chávez, Venezuela is the first major oil producer to use its oil revenue to liberate the poor. Mavis Mendez has seen, in her 95 years, a parade of governments preside over the theft of tens of billions of dollars in oil spoils, much of it flown to Miami, together with the steepest descent into poverty ever known in Latin America; from 18% in 1980 to 65% in 1995, three years before Chávez was elected. "We didn't matter in a human sense," she said. "We lived and died without real education and running water, and food we couldn't afford. When we fell ill, the weakest died. In the east of the city, where the mansions are, we were invisible, or we were feared. Now I can read and write my name, and so much more; and whatever the rich and their media say, we have planted the seeds of true democracy, and I am full of joy that I have lived to witness it."
Latin American governments often give their regimes a new sense of legitimacy by holding a constituent assembly that drafts a new constitution. When he was elected in 1998, Chávez used this brilliantly to decentralise, to give the impoverished grassroots power they had never known and to begin to dismantle a corrupt political superstructure as a prerequisite to changing the direction of the economy. His setting-up of missions as a means of bypassing saboteurs in the old, corrupt bureaucracy was typical of the extraordinary political and social imagination that is changing Venezuela peacefully. This is his "Bolivarian revolution", which, at this stage, is not dissimilar to the post-war European social democracies.
Chávez, a former army major, was anxious to prove he was not yet another military "strongman". He promised that his every move would be subject to the will of the people. In his first year as president in 1999, he held an unprecedented number of votes: a referendum on whether or not people wanted a new constituent assembly; elections for the assembly; a second referendum ratifying the new constitution - 71% of the people approved each of the 396 articles that gave Mavis and Celedonia and Ana Lucia, and their children and grandchildren, unheard-of freedoms, such as Article 123, which for the first time recognised the human rights of mixed-race and black people, of whom Chávez is one. "The indigenous peoples," it says, "have the right to maintain their own economic practices, based on reciprocity, solidarity and exchange ... and to define their priorities ... " The little red book of the Venezuelan constitution became a bestseller on the streets. Nora Hernandez, a community worker in Petare barrio, took me to her local state-run supermarket, which is funded entirely by oil revenue and where prices are up to half those in the commercial chains. Proudly, she showed me articles of the constitution written on the backs of soap-powder packets. "We can never go back," she said. In La Vega barrio, I listened to a nurse, Mariella Machado, a big round black woman of 45 with a wonderfully wicked laugh, stand and speak at an urban land council on subjects ranging from homelessness to the Iraq war. That day, they were launching Mision Madres de Barrio, a programme aimed specifically at poverty among single mothers. Under the constitution, women have the right to be paid as carers, and can borrow from a special women's bank. From next month, the poorest housewives will get about £120 a month.
It is not surprising that Chávez has now won eight elections and referendums in eight years, each time increasing his majority, a world record. He is the most popular head of state in the western hemisphere, probably in the world. That is why he survived, amazingly, a Washington-backed coup in 2002. Mariella and Celedonia and Nora and hundreds of thousands of others came down from the barrios and demanded that the army remain loyal. "The people rescued me," Chávez told me. "They did it with all the media against me, preventing even the basic facts of what had happened. For popular democracy in heroic action, I suggest you need look no further.
"The venomous attacks on Chávez, who arrives in London tomorrow, have begun and resemble uncannily those of the privately owned Venezuelan television and press, which called for the elected government to be overthrown. Fact-deprived attacks on Chávez in the Times and the Financial Times this week, each with that peculiar malice reserved for true dissenters from Thatcher's and Blair's one true way, follow a travesty of journalism on Channel 4 News last month, which effectively accused the Venezuelan president of plotting to make nuclear weapons with Iran, an absurd fantasy. The reporter sneered at policies to eradicate poverty and presented Chávez as a sinister buffoon, while Donald Rumsfeld was allowed to liken him to Hitler, unchallenged. In contrast, Tony Blair, a patrician with no equivalent democratic record, having been elected by a fifth of those eligible to vote and having caused the violent death of tens of thousands of Iraqis, is allowed to continue spinning his truly absurd political survival tale.
Chávez is, of course, a threat, especially to the United States. Like the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, who based their revolution on the English co-operative moment, and the moderate Allende in Chile, he offers the threat of an alternative way of developing a decent society: in other words, the threat of a good example in a continent where the majority of humanity has long suffered a Washington-designed peonage. In the US media in the 1980s, the "threat" of tiny Nicaragua was seriously debated until it was crushed. Venezuela is clearly being "softened up" for something similar. A US army publication, Doctrine for Asymmetric War against Venezuela, describes Chávez and the Bolivarian revolution as the "largest threat since the Soviet Union and Communism".
When I said to Chávez that the US historically had had its way in Latin America, he replied: "Yes, and my assassination would come as no surprise. But the empire is in trouble, and the people of Venezuela will resist an attack. We ask only for the support of all true democrats.
THE FILMMAKERS
Directed, written and reported by
JOHN PILGER
Directed and Produced by
CHRIS MARTIN
Executive Producer
MICHAEL WATT
Directors of Photography
PRESTON CLOTHIER
RUPERT BINSLEY
Archive Producer
CARL DEAL
Associate Producers
DAVID BOARDMAN
ASIF ISMAIL
Co-Executive Producers
DAVID BLAKE
SCOTT YOUNG
Editor
JOE FROST
Researchers
PABLO NAVARRETE
ANN CHAPLIN
Composers
JESPER MATTSSON
MAKOTO SAKAMOTO
Production Executive (Granada)
ANGELA PIERCE
Senior Head of Production (Granada)
SUE DUNFORD
Commercial Director (Granada)
JOHN HOLLYWOOD
Production Managers
EMILY SENIOR
RUTH CODY
Post Production
ONSIGHT UPSTAIRS
VIDEO SONICS
Online Editor
JOHN MYERS
Music Coordinator
SHAUN MACARTNEY
Assistant Editors
EDWARD RADFORD
SIMON GREEN
Producer
WAYNE YOUNG
MUSIC CREDITS
“A CHANGE IS GONNA COME”
Composed by Sam Cooke
Published by ABKCO Music, Ltd.
Performed by Sam Cooke
Courtesy of ABKCO Music & Records, Inc.
‘SOMETHING INSIDE (SO STRONG)'
Composed by Labi Siffre
Published by Universal/Empire Music Ltd
Performed by Labi Siffre
Courtesy of Rhino UK
“LA SOGA”
Composed by Ali Primera
Published by Vander Music Venezolana, C.A.
EDIMUSA Publishing Group
Performed by Ali Primera.
Courtesy of Vander Music Venezolana, C.A.
“JAEAEKARIEN MARSSI OP.91A”
Jean Sibelius
Used by permission of Breitkopf & Haertel, Wiesbaden, Germany
Performed by Mattie Hyökki Helsinki University Choir
Courtesy of Rhino UK
"PLEGARIA A UN LABRADOR"
by Victor Jara
Courtesy of The Victor Jara Foundation