The War On Democracy

Having travelled throughout Latin America for a year in 1984, the abiding memory of that time was the close similarities with South Africa. Similar societies ravaged by the same third world scourges of poverty, illiteracy and corruption. In addition these countries were also deeply scarred by military dictatorships, equally as venal as systemic apartheid. Much of what we know about our recent history is reflected in the political narrative of Latin America; many of our current challenges coincide and, hopefully, so will our future successes. John Pilger's latest film examines these issues and provides the customary fearless reportage:



Pilger wrote this about the film: The War On Democracy is my first film for cinema. It follows more than 55 documentary films for television, which began with The Quiet Mutiny, set in Vietnam. Most of my films have told stories of people's struggles against rapacious power and of attempts to subvert and control our historical memory. Described by Harold Pinter as a great silence unbroken by the incessant din of the media age, it assures the powerful in the west that the struggle of whole societies against their crimes is merely "superficially recorded, let alone documented, let alone acknowledged... It never happened. Even while it was happening it never happened. It didn't matter. It was of no interest".

Modern fictional cinema rarely seems to break political silences. The very fine Motorcycle Diaries was a generation too late. In this country, where Hollywood sets the liberal boundaries, the work of Ken Loach and a few others is an honourable exception. However, the cinema is changing as if by default. The documentary has returned to the big screen and is being embraced by the public, in the US and all over. They were still clapping Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 two months after it opened. Why? The answer is uncomplicated. It was a powerful film that helped people make sense of news that no longer made sense. It did not present the usual phoney "balance" as a pretence for presenting an establishment consensus. It was not riddled with the cliches, platitudes and power assumptions that permeate "current affairs". It was realist cinema, as important as The Grapes of Wrath was in the 1930s, and people devoured it.

The War On Democracy is not the same. It comes out of a British commercial television tradition that is too often passed over: the pioneering of bold factual journalism that treated other societies not as post-imperial curios, as useful or expendable to "us", but extraordinary and important in their own terms. These days, with misnamed "reality" programmes consuming much of television like a plague of cane toads, cinema has been handed a timely opportunity. Such are the dangers imposed on us all today by a rampant, neo-fascist superpower, and so urgent is our need for uncontaminated information that people are prepared to buy a cinema ticket to get it. The War On Democracy examines the false democracy that comes with western corporations and financial institutions and a war waged, materially and as propaganda, against popular democracy. It is the story of the people I first saw 40 years ago; but they are no longer invisible; they are a mighty political movement, reclaiming noble concepts distorted by corporatism and they are defending the most basic human rights in a war being waged against all of us.

In The War On Democracy, the camera sweeps across the Andes in Bolivia to the highest and poorest city on earth, El Alto, then follows Juan Delfin, a priest and a taxi driver, into a cemetery where children are buried. That Bolivia has been asset-stripped by multinational companies, aided by a corrupt elite, is an epic story described by this one man and this spectacle. That the people of Bolivia have stood up, expelled the foreign consortium that took their water resources, even the water that fell from the sky, is understood as the camera pans across a giant mural that Juan Delfin painted. This is cinema, a moving mural of ordinary lives and triumphs.

South Africa's New Struggle

The last article in the series is by John Pilger, author of "Freedom next time". He argues that the struggle continues, with globalization having replaced apartheid as the enemy:

The ANC government has allowed the world's most voracious companies to escape reparations for poisoning the land and its people. When I returned to South Africa following the fall of apartheid, I asked Ahmed Kathrada to take me to Robben Island. Known affectionately as Kathy, he wore dark glasses to cover eyes damaged by the glare of the limestone where he and Nelson Mandela had wielded a pick for decades. He showed me his cell, five feet by five feet, where "the light was burning bright, day and night". I wondered how he had emerged from a quarter-century of incarceration as a sane, rounded, tolerant and gracious human being. His reasons included the teachings of Gandhi and the support of his loved ones, but, above all, "there was the struggle, without which nothing changes".

This sense of struggle is back in South Africa. The other day, I met the writer Breyten Breytenbach, who spent eight years in prison under the apartheid regime. Speaking at the Time of the Writer festival in Durban, he evoked the "dreams" of the great liberation fighters Steve Biko and Robert Sobukwe. "How are we going to stop this seemingly irrevocable 'progress' of South Africa to a totalitarian one-party state?" he asked.

It is a question many ask in a country that now typifies an economic apartheid imposed across the world under a cover of "economic growth" and liberal, corporate jargon. For "democracy", read socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor. For "governance" and "modernity", read a system of division and plunder designed and approved in Washington, Brussels and Davos - a system in which, says the South African finance minister, Trevor Manuel, "winners flourish". And he speaks from a country where inequality and poverty are described as "desperate", where the ANC government has allowed the world's most voracious companies to escape reparations for poisoning the land and its people, and which has been suckered by British arms companies into buying 24 Hawk fighter jets at £17m each, "by far the most expensive option", according to a House of Commons report.

Britain's Department for International Development has played a notorious role. Although required by law not to spend money other than on poverty reduction, DfID is, in reality, a privatising agency that greases the way for multi nationals to take over public services. In 2004, the department paid the Adam Smith Institute, an extreme right-wing think tank, £6.3m for plans to "reform" the "public sector" in South Africa, promoting "business-to-business" links between Brit ish and South African companies whose singular interest is profit.

Once the wretched Robert Mugabe is gone, Zimbabwe will get the same treatment. Offering a billion pounds' worth of "aid", the British government will lead the return of capital, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund to restore what was, long before Mugabe's wrecking, one of the most exploited and unequal societies in Africa. The new heist was outlined on 5 April at the amusingly titled Progressive Governance Conference in Britain, one of Tony Blair's legacies, where "left-of-centre" leaders pretend to be crisis managers instead of, as is often the case, the cause of the crisis. (In 1999, Blair flew twice to South Africa to promote the now scandalous arms deal.)

The South African president, Thabo Mbeki, is said to have been recruited to get rid of the obstacle that is Mugabe, but he is cautious, no doubt recalling that Mugabe, on his last visit to South Africa, received an embarrassing ovation from the black crowd. This was not so much an endorsement of his despotism as a reminder that most South Africans had not forgotten one of the ANC's "unbreakable promises" - that almost a third of arable land would be redistributed by 2000. Today the figure is less than 4 per cent.

Meanwhile, the evictions continue, along with urban dispossession, water disconnections and the ubiquitous indignity of begging. "Our country belongs to all who live in it," say the opening words of the ANC's Freedom Charter, declared more than half a century ago. Recently, the South African police calculated that the number of protests across the country had doubled in two years to more than 10,000 a year. This may be the highest rate of dissent in the world. Once again, like Kathy, they are calling it "struggle".