John Pilger is an Australian journalist and documentary filmmaker who, over the past forty years, has won an international reputation and many awards. His distinguished career has taken him from war zones to crisis situations all over the world. In The War On Democracy, Pilger examines the relationship between the United States and South America, specifically countries such as Venezuela, Bolivia and Chile which have had to struggle for their independence against the US’s imperial agenda and CIA aggression. The film’s main purpose is to show that “people power,” “the seed beneath the snow” in Pilger’s words, is the most effective antidote to Washington’s imperialist agenda.
Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez is the dominant figure in the film, a modern-day Simon Bolivar who inspires South Americans everywhere to throw off the despotic rule of the American empire. According to Pilger, the US has systematically coerced small countries to fall in line with Washington’s policies, beginning with the coup in Guatemala in 1950. Pilger believes that the US created an atmosphere of anti-Communist hysteria and fear of nuclear war in order to justify its imperialist foreign policy.
By the 1970s Washington controlled much of Latin America through various dictators. Democratically elected leaders such as Salvador Allende, former president of Chile, were brutally ousted and internal affairs were routinely interfered with in order to align those nations with, as former CIA agent Duane Claridge says, US national security interests.
Those countries were turned into “laboratory experiments” for right-wing economists such as Milton Friedman and the Chicago Boys who assisted the white, governing elites in getting richer at the expense of the masses of poor people. All that is changing now, says Pilger, as People Power transforms politics through grassroots movements created by people who come down from the barrios to take back the power taken from them by Washington-supported dictators. Chavez unleashed this revolt, says Pilger, and as a consequence the Empire’s power is fading.
Pilger’s agenda has remained the same ever since he covered the war in Vietnam: he is anti-American, anti-capitalist and anti-globalization, and anyone who has a similar agenda is his friend, ally or even hero. Hugo Chavez is a case in point. Pilger idolizes this strongman ruler and gives him every benefit of the doubt.
However, Pilger must ask one question that might offend Chavez: the barrios he saw on his way from the airport showed that poverty had not yet been eliminated in Venezuela, in spite of the billions it had earned from oil. Chavez’s reply is masterful. “We don’t want to be rich,” he says, “but we want to live with dignity.” He goes on to explain that Venezuelans don’t want to be millionaires because that is how Americans define being rich, not Venezuelans. Pilger seems satisfied his question has been answered.
His support for Chavez, apart from this one minor quibble, is complete. He interviews people from the barrio who attest to the benefits Chavez’s revolution has brought the poor. Once they felt excluded from society but no more. Illiteracy has been defeated (“a 95-year old woman now reads and writes for the first time”) and there are free medical clinics now (War). This part of the film resembles the social realism of Soviet documentaries in which the barrio’s inhabitants are shown as poor but honest and are characterized by “having the wickedest laugh” (Pilger). By contrast, Pilger takes the viewer of a tour of East Caracas where the wealthy live behind high fences guarded by vicious dogs, and tours the mansion of one of the elite whose spiritual homes are said to be Washington, DC and Miami.
This man collects art on his travels and accuses Chavez of being another Castro. It was people like that, Pilger suggests, who kidnapped Chavez and organized a demonstration of anti-Chavez groups, people who had been “inflamed by the media.” In Pilger’s world, only the villains are influenced by the media; the grassroots democratic movements are the philosophical descendants of Abraham Lincoln, who strive for government of, for and by the people. When Venezuelans are asked if there is freedom of speech in their country they laughingly assure Pilger that there must be because Chavez is ridiculed and criticized on every TV channel (War).
Since then many of those TV channels have been shut down. Time Magazine reports that “a media law that increases penalties for slander has encouraged self-censorship. And even media owners soft on Chavez admit that the constant pro-government trailers and late-night slandering of the opposition on the main state-run channel, Venezolana de Television, is little more than propaganda.” In other words, not only has Chavez stifled criticism of his regime, he encourages propaganda in its favor.
This is not unexpected, and it may even be argued that Chavez could not afford to let the media criticize him around the clock. To Pilger, however, any concession to factions critical of Chavez would be to weaken his case. Ironically, his omissions do exactly that. As Ian O’Doherty says about Pilger’s documentary, The New Rulers of the World, “many of his perfectly reasonable arguments are neutered by his scattergun rage against anyone who has the temerity to point out the obvious and baffling inconsistencies in his work. Pilger’s rhetoric is always polarizing every issue he touches on.”
That tendency is also evident in his support for Saddam Hussein who made Pilger feel at home and safe during his visit to Iraq and Pilger, in his turn, “displayed a sublime indifference to the obvious fact that similar privileges did not extend to masses of ordinary Iraqis who were slaughtered by Saddam’s secret police.” He defended Slobodan Milosovic, whom he portrayed “as a victim of American aggression rather than the architect of war crimes against the Albanian Kosovar minority” (Lapkin). Similarly, Pilger continues to defend Chilean president Salvator Allende in spite of evidence supplied by recently opened Kremlin archives.
The overthrow of Salvador Allende in 1971 is an example for Pilger of America’s imperial arrogance in disposing of an elected leader who threatened their agenda. In fact, Allende was controlled by the KGB; as KGB defector Vasili Mitrokhin says, “regular Soviet contact with Allende after his election was maintained… by his KGB case officer, Svyatoslav Kuznetsov, who was instructed by the centre to ‘exert a favourable influence on Chilean government policy’.”
According to Allende’s KGB file, he “was made to understand the necessity of reorganising Chile’s army and intelligence services, and of setting up a relationship between Chile’s and the USSR’s intelligence services. Allende was said to react positively.” Allende was given a $100,000 by the KGB to keep him reacing positively. Still, the Kremlin was reluctant to commit itself to his regime due to “mounting evidence of chronic economic mismanagement” and Allende’s unwillingness to take a hard line with his opposition (Andrew and Mitrokhin).
The first coup attempt was made by Chile’s right-wing party, Patria y Libertad but failed due to poor organization. What the KGB and General Augusto Pinochet Ugarro noted, however, was the apathetic response on the part of the Chilean proletariat who failed to respond to Allende’s appeal “to pour into the center of the city” to defend his government. In the successful coup, Allende ignored the Communist Party’s warning, and instead of surrounding himself with the people he chose to stay in his presidential offices where he was guarded by 50 or 60 Cuban-trained soldiers (Andrew and Mitrokhin).
Pilger explains that Allende wanted a just democracy, one that was independent of American influence, and that is why he refused to leave his office where he made one final broadcast, then shot himself. To Pilger and his fellow-travelers, however, Allende remains a martyr to the cause of liberating South America from America’s imperial ambitions.
Pilger knows how to appeal to the audience’s emotions, and there is certainly enough material in that part of the world and in those times for him to work with. Tales of rape and murder are plentiful, and by putting some of the victims of South America’s harsh politics before the camera, Pilger makes an eloquent case for political reform. The problem is that his world consists of villains and heroes. People living in the barrios are invariably honest, civic-minded and cooperative. This is a little like Marie-Antoinette’s fantasies of peasant life. Pilger writes that
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.”
Sacha Feinman sees it differently. He reports that “over the last decade, Caracas has become a very dangerous place to live. “Unlike Colombia’s narco-guerrillas or the heavily armed gangs in the favelas of Rio and São Paulo, crime in Caracas is indiscriminate; it has more to do with anarchy and the failure of infrastructure than it does organized, armed groups challenging the government’s monopoly on the use of force.” That is a far cry from Pilger’s picture of life among the poor.
Pilger’s documentary would have benefited from a more pluralistic approach, one that acknowledged Chavez’s shortcomings, the excesses produced by his grandiose vision of Venezuela’s role in South America, and the political and logistical difficulties involved in realizing an ambitious social reform agenda. Pilger could have admitted that Pinochet, for all his fascist methods, brought economic reform to Chile, that the water rights dispute in El Alto was not a simple matter of rich versus poor, or that there is crime in the barrios, without diluting the film’s powerful message.
He could even have admitted that the United States may not have the smartest foreign policy in the world but that its crimes against humanity are minor when compared to everyday political persecution in much of South America – a fact that cannot be blamed on anyone but local leaders.
Works Cited
Andrew, Christopher and Mitrokhin, Vasili. “How ‘Weak’ Allende Was Left Out in the Cold by the KGB.” Extract from The Mitrokhin Archive Volume II. Timesonline, 2005. Web.
Feinman, Sacha. “Crime and Class in Caracas.” Slate. 2006.
Gould, Jens. “Is Chavez Stifling the Media?” Time Magazine. 2007. Web.
Lapkin, Ted. “Ditch this Bitter Pilger.” The Australian. 2004.
O’Doherty, Ian. “Pious Pilger Preaches Only to the Converted.” Business Post. 2003. Web.
Pilger, John. “Contentment in Caracas.” Antiwar. 2006. Web.
The War on Democracy. Dirs. Christopher Martin and John Pilger. Lions Gate, 2007.
Outline
- Introduction: Pilger’s career and the main theme of The War on Democracy: people power as the best antidote to American imperialism.
- 2nd paragraph: Chavez is the dominant figure in the film, a modern-day Simon Bolivar fighting against US attempts at aligning small countries with its own interests. The Cold War was used as a justification for these regime changes. It was Chavez who first led the revolt against US imperialism.
- 3rd paragraph: Pilger’s agenda is anti-American, anti-capitalist and anti-globalization. Anyone who agrees with him is a friend, ally or even hero. Chaves is a hero to him. Pilger’s question about continued poverty in Venezuela receives a nonsensical answer but he accepts it all the same.
- 4th paragraph: He interviews people from the barrio who regard Chavez as their savior. This is contrasted with a visit to East Caracas, home of the wealthy. Pilger interview one wealthy man who regards Chavez as another Castro. Anti-Chavez groups, says Pilger, have been “inflamed by the media” but freedom of speech remains in effect.
- 5th paragraph: Since the film was made a number of TV channels have been shut down or converted to pro-Chavez propaganda outlets.
- 6th paragraph: Pilger omits everything that doesn’t support his case. He polarizes every issue and that attitude has led to his support for Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic.
- 7th paragraph: Pilger also defends Allende, who has recently been exposed as being under the control of the KGB. The Kremlin was not sure Allende was strong enough to carry out their agenda, so stayed clear during the coup.
- 8th paragraph: To Pilger, however, Allende is a martyr to the cause, although the record shows that Allende was corrupt, that he made many mistakes and that he didn not have popular support.
- 9th paragraph: Pilger knows how to reach his audience and he has ample material to work with. Unfortunately his world consists of heroes and villains, the poor being his heroes. During his 3-week stay in the barrio he saw the poor as noble idealists. The crime rate in the barrio tells a different story, one of “anarchy and the failure of infrastructure.”
- 10th paragraph: Pilgers film would have benefited from greater inclusiveness because that would have given him credibility beyond the small socialist circle in which he moves.