Learning on ScreenPilger’s War
Pilger’s film shows that these crimes are systematic and ongoing. Behind the ‘war’ on democracy lies a war around the very meaning of the word. For many right wing politicians, democracy is virtually the same thing as the ‘free’ market, even though that has meant supporting coups and military dictatorships throughout Latin America. What frightened US elites, both political and economic, was a rather more authentic grass-roots democracy that has flourished in Latin America in between the jackboot of US backed fascism and military rule. Such grass roots democracy recovers the meaning of the word from Ancient Greece, rule by the people (demos).
The War on Terrorism (Lions Gate Home Entertainment)
The War on Democracy opens with a long introduction into what has been happening in Venezuela since the 1998 election of President Chavez. Within the western media, a combination of imperial arrogance (nothing progressive can come from outside the west) and contemporary interests (no alternative to global, unrestrained free market capitalism must be allowed to rear its head) has meant that Chavez and his Bolivarian revolution have received little in the way of thoughtful coverage. The exception is another documentary, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised (2003), which was an eye-witness account of the attempted (US backed) coup against Chavez in 2002.
Inverting reality, the typical coverage of Chavez in the UK makes the lazy and casual assumption that he is some kind of dictator, even though he has won numerous elections with a large percentage of the popular vote (certainly larger than George Bush ever has). Time Out recently described Chavez as a dictator, while the BBC’s John Sweeney recently broadcast a 30 minute documentary that aligned itself very closely with the views of Venezuela’s elite internal opposition.
In the opening Venezuela section of his film, Pilger by contrast adopts a comical mock interest in and sympathy for the plight of the elites as they bemoan their relative loss of political power. But as he looks back to the past, and covers the story of progressive change and repression in such countries as Guatemala, Bolivia, El Salvador and Chile, the tone darkens considerably.
The rich, the powerful and the agents of repression who Pilger interviews display an almost psychotic ‘disconnect’ between the political and economic forces they support
The rich, the powerful and the agents of repression who Pilger interviews display an almost psychotic ‘disconnect’ between the political and economic forces they support and the torture, murder, poverty, misery and injustice which result from those forces. Long-term alignment with the interests of capitalism seems to be bad for your mental health.
Perhaps a warning to this effect ought to be put on commodities, just as in Venezuela articles of the new constitution are put on the packaging of basic foodstuffs as a sign of the entry of the masses into political life.
The film spans the gulf between people like Duane Clarridge, chief of the CIA’s Latin American bureau in the 1980s, and ordinary people struggling for justice. Clarridge, now retired, shorn of his media minders and the need to be diplomatic, speaks the real language of imperial power unadorned with all that rhetorical guff about ‘democracy’.
Against that, ordinary people, in moving testimony, recall the torture and murder that they endured or witnessed as repression kicked in. And just as remorselessly, resistance returns. This resistance, Pilger concludes, as Sam Cooke’s ‘A Change Is Gonna Come’ plays us out, is ‘unbeatable’.
Mike Wayne
E-mail: michael.wayne@brunel.ac.uk
