Tag Archives: pilger

John Pilger “Documentaries that Changed the World”

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“Documentaries that Changed the World” was released as a 4 DVD set in 2006. It has a small booklet written by the Guardian’s Mark Curtis (who also appears in “Stealing a Nation”). It also has an interview with John Pilger by Anthony Hayward at the Guardian Hay Festival in 2006. For your money you get a total runtime of 644 minutes covering 12 separate documentaries. The earliest dates back to 1970 in Vietnam. We track John in no particular order as he globe trots across the world taking in Cambodia, Nicaragua, East Timor, Australia, Iraq, Palestine and the Chagos Islands. We get to see absolutely everything wrong with the world through John’s eyes. In this he is utterly faultless. Continue reading →

John Pilger “The New Rulers of the World”

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ISBN 978-1-85984-412-0. “The New Rulers of the World” was written by John Pilger and published in 2002 by Verso. The book is 215 pages long not including notes and index. John is best known as a TV Journalist and Documentary maker. We recently reviewed his DVD box set “Documentaries that Changed the World” so if you have seen that you will know what to expect. The book is essentially four long essays. It opens with “The Model Pupil” which discusses dictatorship in Indonesia. This was new to us. It covers how the west supported the appalling dictatorship of General Suharto. However it is the writing concerning the over-throw of Nationalist President Achmed Sukarno in 1966 that is most original. Continue reading →

John Pilger “The War on Democracy”

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John Pilger is somewhat of a romantic and this comes across in his 2007 documentary charting the American Empire’s attempts to crush South American Democracy since 1945. In content there is not a lot here that you could not read about in far more detail in Chomsky’s brilliant “Deterring Democracy”. However, Chomsky is a hardened realist who would probably not put quite such a shine on recent events. For it is the very idea that Latin America must not be self-governed – under ANY circumstance that is so very frightening. The struggle has been bitter and countless lives have been lost. In fact this is a very painful documentary to watch. Continue reading →