Films with: Pilger, John

Breaking the silence truth and lies in the war on terror /

Journalist John Pilger investigates the discrepancies between claims by Great Britain and the United States about the War on Tterrorism and the facts as he uncovers them in Afghanistan and in the United States. In Afghanistan Pilger illustrates how the people suffer because the old warlords are regaining power, religious fundamentalism is rising, and military skirmishes continue routinely; he concludes that the Taliban is re-emerging and that Al-Qaida is still active. Pilger conducts interviews with William Kristol, Douglas Feith, John Bolton, Wesley Clark, and others. In these interviews he discusses the ideas of pre-emptive military action, the real motives behind the military activities in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the historical context of the United States' military policy.

DVD 7011

Coming war on China

"The United States and China may well be on the road to war - and with a noose of US bases now encircling the world's newest superpower, nuclear war is not only imaginable but a nightmarish prospect. The Coming War on China is both a warning and an inspiring story of people's resistance to war and the occupation of their countries."--From container.

DVD 12226

Death of a nation the Timor conspiracy : a special report /

On December 7, 1975 Indonesia secretly -- but with the complicity of the Western powers including the US, the UK, and Australia -- invaded the small nation of East Timor. Two Australian television crews attempting to document the invasion were murdered. In 1993, with the Indonesian army still occupying the country, John Pilger and his crew including director David Munro, slipped into East Timor and made this film. In the intervening 18 years, an estimated 200,000 East Timorese -- 1/3 of the population -- had been slaughtered by the Indonesian military. The CIA has described it as one of the worst mass-murders of the 20th century. Pilger tells the story using clandestine footage of the countryside, internment camps and even Fretlin guerrillas, as well as interviews with Timorese exiles, including Jose Ramos Horta and Jose Gusmao, and Australian, British, and Indonesian diplomats. Nixon had called Indonesia the "greatest prize in southeast Asia" because of its oil reserves and other natural resources. Even though Indonesia had no historic or legal claim to East Timor, it was convenient for diplomats to declare that East Timor, just gaining its independence from Portugal, would not be a viable state. However the lie was given to this argument when Australia and Indonesia signed the Timor Gap Oil Treaty and carved up the huge oil and gas reserves in the seabed off East Timor. None of the politicians from that period -- President Ford, Henry Kissinger, Daniel Moynihan, Margaret Thatcher, John Major, Gough Whitlam -- has clean hands. The Indonesian military used US and British planes to bombard the island, while the defense ministers proclaimed ignorance. As Pilger gets an Australian diplomat to admit, East Timor was considered "expendable." But no one watching the massacre in the Dili cemetery can excuse the geopolitical machinations that led to this genocide.

DVD 4875

Do you remember Vietnam? a report /

In 1978, three years after the fall of Saigon, John Pilger went back to Vietnam to find out what had happened under the new regime. He talks with a young tour guide at a war crimes museum, who had been imprisoned in the infamous US tiger cages. He follows a former North Vietnamese soldier into the underground base where he spent 20 years crawling through tunnels undetected. He visits the street in Hanoi that was the target of the largest single aerial bombardment in history. And he shows us the re-education camps where former drug addicts, prostitutes, South Vietnam soldiers, and others are being taught what to think. An he reminds us of the long history of Vietnam's wars for independence. 44% of Vietnam's forests have been decimated, poisonous chemicals have produced babies with deformations, 58,000 Americans and 2-5 million Vietnamese lost their lives. And all of this suffering was for what? "To stop the spread of Chinese communism" was the rationale. And yet, Pilger argues, if we had let them form their own independent state in the late 1940s, what probably would have emerged is what is emerging now -- a kind of Asian Yugoslavia.

DVD 4873

Quiet mutiny

In this, the first of his 58 documentary films, John Pilger combines candid interviews and amazing frontline footage of Vietnam to portray a growing rift between the US military bureaucrats -- "lifers" -- and the soldiers who physically and mentally fight the war on the ground, the "grunts." By 1970, it is an internal sense of disillusionment and frustration born from this rift that is triggering the withdrawal of US forces from Vietnam. As the US employs psychological warfare against its enemy, Pilger finds himself unable to glean significant information from the military; a press conference he attends is nicknamed "the 5 'clock follies" for the evasive nature of the proceedings. And so it is with the grunts, the "wheels of the green machine," that Pilger finds a very human side to the US presence in Vietnam -- soldiers who are at once ready to serve their country and doubtful of their purpose there. Plied with visits from Miss America and ignored by Vice President Spiro Agnew, they experience the war in a way many of their superiors do not. Filmed at Camp Snuffy in 1970, The Quiet Mutiny presents a character study of the common soldier during the Vietnam War, revealing for the first time the shifting morale and open rebellion of Western troops.

DVD 4753

War on democracy

Journalist John Pilger examines the role of Washington in America's manipulation of Latin American politics during the last 50 years focusing on the struggle by ordinary people to free themselves from poverty and racism.

DVD 5834

War you don't see

"The War You Don't See traces the history of 'embedded' and independent reporting from the carnage of World War I to the destruction of Hiroshima, and from the invasion of Vietnam to the current war in Afghanistan. As weapons and propaganda are ever more sophisticated, the very nature of war has developed into an 'electronic battlefield'".--Videodisc container label.

DVD 8971

Year zero the silent death of Cambodia : a report /

As the first complete report of the atrocities committed by the Khmer Rouge and the devastating affects of US bombing in Cambodia during the Vietnam War, Year Zero: The Silent Death of Cambodia is an important and historic document of the grim reign of Pol Pot and the world's response of indifference and inaction. Year Zero was 1975, the end of the secret US bombing campaign against the Viet Cong that saw 100,000 tons of bombs dropped over Cambodia, and the emergence of the Khmer Rouge party as a ruling force. That year saw the desertion of the capital of Phnom Penh and the displacement of some 2.5 million people, the majority of whom would soon go missing. Pilger explores the roots of the US bombing campaign that began in 1969, contrasting ti sharply with powerful footage of sick and starving Cambodians and interviews with relief workers with UNICEF and the Red Cross as well as imprisoned members of Pol Pot's regime. At the time of its first broadcast in 1979, Year Zero was for many the first glimpse of a harrowing injustice that had been played out with little fanfare. John Pilger lays bare the entire chain of events, from the removal of King Norodom Sihanouk to ensuing famine and genocide under the Khmer Rouge. The film is both disturbing and poignant, a sobering portrait of Cambodia's recent history.

DVD 4874