Customer Reviews

The War on Democracy [ NON-USA FORMAT, PAL, Reg.4 Import - Australia ]

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This is an excellent introduction to South America for-- well-- just about all citizens of the United States. The vast majority of our population knows so little (if anything) about our neighbors. Yet the fickle majority finds it easy to accept that anyone labelled an evil dictator by the mainstream media must be so. Philger has compiled an impressive and well-balanced array of interviews with South American national leaders, grassroots citizens, and even former CIA agents andaffluent citizens of ech country who oppose some of the popular leaders. Gues what? Hugo Chavaz is a human being. How easy it is to villify anyone who doesn't happen to agree with the American way of life. Watch this and you may be ready to move to Venezuela, or Bolivia. A great companion to Olver Stone's more recent, "South of the Border," whicfh I also recommend.

I found Pilger's documentary convincing and challenging. It would be a useful documentary for a high school teacher of history or politics to create a lively debate. Has US intervention in South America been altruistic or self serving? If self serving - at what price to the local populations of South America? Did the USA destroy fledging democracies in South America and aid in the installation of criminal dictatorships to serve its own interests and at the cost of thousands of lives? Even if you dont believe everything the film asserts it certainly makes you think beyond superficial propaganda. Full marks to Pilger for this brave attempt to awaken the political conscience of the world.

Before emigrating to the U.S., I grew up in Latin America under - what else? - a dictatorship.

I found this documentary very well thought-out and researched. It should be required viewing every American school, every year.

Although I must admit that my favorite part was when the head of CIA Latin American Operations, presented with the facts, said that the U.N. and Human Right Watch are nothing but liars and propagandists. This from someone from the CIA. The CIA, whose daily staple currency is lying, deceit, propaganda, extortion, blackmail and murder!

Not to mention his cavalier attitude that the Americans are allowed to do ANYTHING they wish, in the name of National Security, and because they are Americans. For him, "National Security" is America's excuse for any type of action, up to and including murder by proxy.

So long as the American People pay 30 cents less per pound for grapes at the supermarket counter, it doesn't matter if they ruin a nation's economy and condemn an entire people to oppressive dictatorship, torture and death by the thousands...

This is a documentary that every single American should watch. Although for most, it would create no impact or change in world-view at all... What we seem to care about is cheap gas, no matter what the costs to someone else.

I dislike it when an American politician gets on TV and says that the U.S. is the champion of Justice, Democracy, and Freedom.

Once more: Excellent documentary!

I watched this film at the Vancouver Film Festival several years ago. I actually went into see this, without a clue about what I was going to watch. I just tagged along with a friend, and just got so absorbed by it.

It's definitely an eye-opener. I recall walking out of the theater, thinking how capitalism seems to benefit us living in the first-world countries, but strip bare the poorer countries that we should be trying to help.
And yet, simultaneously, I remember walking out frustrated at the biased perspectives of the different worlds--the world in which we live in, and the world in which they live in. The documentary was, indeed, incredible journalism, but no doubt the viewer is subject to the biased opinions of the characters that appear in the film, as well as the opinions of Pilger himself. We are left to fend for ourselves--to determine where we stand, and what we can make of the information we have been given.

In any case, the movie inspired an artwork out of me. It is absolutely worth a watch. Even if its political messages do not lean your way, hopefully, you'll at least be exposed to different views and concepts that may broaden your worldview.

This is a next doco by John Pilger talentedly telling of modern exploitation of Latin America by mixing Gen. A. Pinochet's military coup with recent Venezuela's affairs while traditionally-for-his-works blaming the USA for all the evil round this region in this case.

One could suggest, perhaps, Sydney-born London-based journalist's energy could more sufficiently be deployed for dismantling a neo-racist "multiculturalism" reality of his birth country or/and steadily world-resource-consuming aggressiveness of his historical motherland he flourishing in by supposedly fighting for freedoms and democracy in distant foreign lands mostly, among which the sovereign US are traditional target for loyal monarchists of a N. America's former official master.