No stars
"The War on Democracy"
Not very good at all. I remember some things about Chile in the seventies, Guatemala in the eighties, the contra rebels in Nicaragua. I can remember an uncharacteristic religion lesson when a brother of the Brotherhood of St Lawrence came with his slide projector to our (catholic) school and showed us pictures of the decayed bodies of dead nuns being retrieved from shallow graves in El Salvador, in 1980.
I was imagining Pilger would have done some investigative journalism to explain how/why he believed these things were all done to kill democratic government in Latin America.
Instead, it was a brief rehash of the old footage (right back to the fifties) about Pinochet, El Gringo and Carmona and the attitude of Nixon, Regan, Bush 1 and Bush not another 1, towards them.
What Bill Clinton, Jimmie Carter, LBJ or JFK did or failed to do is not mentioned here. Dwight Eisenhower's regime is represented by his photogenic vice president, and Gerald Ford seems to have been forgotten.
There is much eulogizing of the democratically elected and reinstated President Chavez, and an unexplained sprinkling of praise for Castro snuck in there, too.
There are all the charlatan tricks of lazy journalists - including "secret documents" from the CIA, that have been revealed years ago, and that revealed only that politicians sometimes make a point of not knowing what the CIA does, lots of pictures of people doing nothing in particular, and interviews of people vehmently saying not very much at all.
There is the baffling and irrelevant inclusion of the "Duck and Cover" movie from 1951.
And an even more baffling affirmation from Pilger that now the USA has moved to a sinister new form of terror - where they support democratic governments where the major parties are all friendly to US interests. Followed by some stirring music and pictures of people going about their business in various parts of Latin America, with the unsupported but stirring pronouncement that now, the will of the people of South America, so long unheard, cannot be ignored!
And what is with Pilger's teeth? Can't he get upper dentures that fit?
