"We journalists... have to be brave enough to defy those who seek our collusion in selling their latest bloody adventure in someone else's country... That means always challenging the official story, however patriotic that story may appear, however seductive and insidious it is. For propaganda relies on us in the media to aim its deceptions not at a far away country but at you at home... In this age of endless imperial war, the lives of countless men, women and children depend on the truth or their blood is on us... Those whose job it is to keep the record straight ought to be the voice of people, not power." -John Pilger

The new film is a powerful and timely investigation into the media's role in war, tracing the history of 'embedded' and independent reporting from the carnage of World War One to the destruction of Hiroshima, and from the invasion of Vietnam to the current war in Afghanistan and disaster in Iraq. As weapons and propaganda become even more sophisticated, the nature of war is developing into an 'electronic battlefield' in which journalists play a key role, and civilians are the victims. But who is the real enemy? (Excerpt from main website)

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"President Bush has promised to rid the world of evil and to lead the great mission to build free societies on every continent. To understand such an epic lie is to understand history. Hidden history. Suppressed history. History that explains why we in the West know a lot about the crimes of others, but almost nothing about our own. The missing word is Empire. The existence of an American Empire is rarely acknowledged."

In his second inauguration address, President Bush pledged to "bring democracy to the world”. In a speech lasting 23 minutes, he mentioned the words ‘democracy’ and ‘liberty’ 21 times. Most of the world, it is fair to say, will have recoiled, many in fear...

Bush’s speech was significant because it finally emptied noble concepts like ‘democracy’ of their true meaning – government, for, by and of the people. Never before have people in the west shown such disenchantment with the democracy they vote for and the version they get. Never before has most of humanity registered such alarm at the ambitions of a great power.

The War on Democracy demonstrates the brutal reality of the America’s notion of 'spreading democracy'; that, in fact, America is actually conducting a war on democracy, and that true popular democracy is now more likely to be found among the poorest of Latin America whose grassroots movements are often ignored in the west. (Excerpt from main website)

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"Never before has the gulf between rich and poor been so vast and inequality so widespread. The facts of globalization are revealing a small group of powerful individuals...Just two-hundred giant corporations dominate a quarter of the world's economic activity. General Motors is now bigger than Denmark. Ford is bigger than South Africa."

In order to examine the true effects of globalization, Pilger turns the spotlight on Indonesia, a country described by the World Bank as a model pupil until its globalized economy collapsed in 1998. The film examines the use of sweatshop factories by famous brand names, and asks some penetrating questions. Who are the real beneficiaries of the globalized economy? Who really rules the world now? Is it governments or a handful of huge companies? The Ford Motor Company alone is bigger than the economy of South Africa. Enormously rich men, like Bill Gates, have a wealth greater than all of Africa. Pilger goes behind the hype of the new global economy and reveals that the divisions between the rich and poor have never been greater -- two thirds of the world's children live in poverty -- and the gulf is widening like never before.

The film looks at the new rulers of the world -- the great multinationals and the governments and institutions that back them -- the IMF and the World Bank. Under IMF rules, millions of people throughout the world lose their jobs and livelihood. The reality behind much of modern shopping and the famous brands is a sweatshop economy, which is being duplicated in country after country.

The film travels to Indonesia and Washington, asking challenging questions seldom raised in the mainstream media and exposing the scandal of globalization, including revealing interviews with top officials of the World Bank and the IMF. (Excerpt from website)

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"We were sold this war on the basis of Iraq possessing a massive arsenal of weapons of mass destruction, which was never found, and won't be found, because there was no massive arsenal of weapons. We were also promised a need for war on the basis of active cooperation between Iraq and Al-Qaeda and the fact that it was just a matter of time before some of these weapons from this massive arsenal were passed to this terrorist group...There was no hard intelligence to establish there was a link between Iraq and Al-Qaeda."

John Pilger dissects the truth and lies in the 'war on terror'. Award-winning journalist John Pilger investigates the discrepancies between American and British claims for the 'war on terror' and the facts on the ground as he finds them in Afghanistan and Washington, DC.

In 2001, as the bombs began to drop, George W. Bush promised Afghanistan "the generosity of America and its allies". Now, the familiar old warlords are regaining power, religious fundamentalism is renewing its grip and military skirmishes continue routinely. In "liberated" Afghanistan, America has its military base and pipeline access, while the people have the warlords who are, says one woman, "in many ways worse than the Taliban".

In Washington, Pilger conducts a series of remarkable interviews with William Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard, and leading Administration officials such as Douglas Feith, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, and John Bolton, Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security. These people, and the other architects of the Project for the New American Century, were dismissed as 'the crazies' by the first Bush Administration in the early 90s when they first presented their ideas for pre-emptive strikes and world domination. (Excerpt from video.google.com)

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"Contrary to a myth long popular in the West, it's been the poor of the world that finance the rich - not the other way around - and this film sets out to explain why. It's also a film about war, a war you don't see on your television screens for it's seldom news. It's been describe as a silent war. Instead of soldiers dying, there are children dying...Instead of the bombing of bridges, there is the tearing down of forests and other natural resources; the bulldozing of farmland; and the running down of schools and hospitals. In many ways, it's like a colonial war. The difference is that these days, people and the resources are controlled not by viceroys and occupying armies, but by other more sophisticated means of which the principle is debt."

John Pilger and David Munro examine the policy of First World banks agreeing loans with Third World countries, who are then unable to meet the cripling interest charges. Won Geneva International TV Award at the North-South Media Encounters event, Geneva, 1993;Gold Medal in the 'Best Documentary Production category' of the International Television Movie Festival, Mount Freedom, New Jersey 1993; Gold Award in the 'Political/International Issues category' at WorldFest-Houston (Houston International Film & Video Festival), 1993; Silver Hugo Award in the 'Documentary - Social/Political category' of the 29th Chicago International Film Festival, 1993. (Excerpt from video.google.com)

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"More than a million people have been forced from their homes and according to the United Nations, untold thousands have been massacred, tortured, and subjected to a modern form of slavery. Burma, says Amnesty International, is a prison behind bars."

John Pilger and David Munro go undercover in one of the world's most isolated, and extraordinary countries, Burma, which AmnestyInternational calls 'a prison without bars'. They discover slave labour preparing for tourism and foreign investment. International Actual Award for Risk Journalism, Barcelona, Spain, 1996; Bronze Plaque in the category of 'Social Issues - International Relations', The Chris Awards, Ohio, 1996; Gold Special Jury Award, 'Film & Video Production division', WorldFest-Charleston, 1996; Award for Best Factual Programme, RTS Midland Centre Awards, Birmingham, 1996; Gold Apple in the category 'Politics: Social organisations in other lands', National Educational Media Network Film & Video Competition at The 1997 NEMN Apple Awards, Oakland, California, 1997; the updated version won a Gold Special Jury Award in the 'Film & Video Production division', WorldFest-Houston, 1999. (Excerpt from video.google.com)

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"Almost all the people in Nicaragua rose up against a tyrant called Somoza, whose family had been in power for more than 40 years, put there by the United States marines. That uprising costs 50,000 lives, almost as many as died for America in Vietnam, but out of a population of less than 3 million people."

In 1979, the Sandinistas won a popular revolution in Nicaragua, putting an end to decades of the corrupt US-backed Somoza dictatorship. They based their reformist ideology on that of the English Co-operative Movement, but was to prove too 'radical' for the Reagan administration. In this film, Pilger describes the achievements of the Sandinistas and their "threat of a good example". (Excerpt from youtube.com)

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"President Nixon and Mr. Kissinger unleashed 100,000 tons of bombs, the equivalent of 5 Hiroshimas. The bombing was their personal decision; they legally and secretly, they bombed Cambodia, a neutral country, back to the Stone Age. And I mean Stone Age in its literal sense."

John Pilger vividly reveals the brutality and murderous political ambitions of the Pol Pot / Khmer Rouge totalitarian regime which bought genocide and despair to the people of Cambodia while neighboring countries, including Australia, shamefully ignored the immense human suffering and unspeakable crimes that bloodied this once beautiful country. (Excerpt from video.google.com)

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"This is a huge bluff of the Israeli establishment, that every criticism of its policy is anti-semitism."

In 1977, the award-winning journalist and film-maker, John Pilger, made a documentary called Palestine Is Still The Issue (1977). He told how almost a million Palestinians had been forced off their land in 1948, and again in 1967. In this in-depth documentary, he has returned to the West Bank of the Jordan and Gaza, and to Israel, to ask why the Palestinians, whose right of return was affirmed by the United Nations more than half a century ago, are still caught in a terrible limbo -- refugees in their own land, controlled by Israel in the longest military occupation in modern times.

"The fate and struggle of the Palestinians," says Pilger, "are not just critical to the overdue recognition of their basic human rights, but are also central to whether the region, and the wider world, are plunged into war. Israel is now one of the biggest military powers in the world. While nothing changes, the dangers become greater. This is a film about a nation of people, traumatized, humiliated and yet resilient. In trying to liberate less than a quarter of historic Palestine, they have had no army, no air force, and no powerful friends -- and have fought back with slingshots and now with the terrorism of the suicide bombers." (Excerpt from website)

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"For almost 10 years of extraordinary isolation imposed by the UN and enforced by America and Britain, have killed more people than the two atomic bombs dropped on Japan - including half a million young children."

After Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, the United Nations (backed strongly by the US and UK) imposed harsh sanctions on Iraq that lasted for 10 years (1991-2001); the harsh restrictions on imports of everything, including access to key medicines, resulted in over a million deaths, more than half a million of which were women and children. That's more deaths than the two atomic bombs dropped on Japan and 9/11 combined.

The purpose was regime change, but it never came. The overwhelming majority of those killed were the poor, elderly, women and children.

Empirically, sanctions overwhelmingly punish the poor, the destitute. While the sanctions were in place, the richest people in control of the resources (Saddam Hussein et al.) still had everything they wanted: food, cars, mansions, access to the best medicines, etc.

Award-winning journalist John Pilger has documented the reality of UN harsh sanctions in this hard-hitting film.  (Excerpt from video.google.com)

Please visit the official website for more information:
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"Hidden from Parliament and the U.S. Congress, the deal was this: the Americans wanted the island, in their words, "swept and sanitized." An entire population was declared expendable; all of them were to be deported."

STEALING A NATION (John Pilger, 2004) is an extraordinary film about the plight of people of the Chagos Islands in the Indian Ocean - secretly and brutally expelled from their homeland by British governments in the late 1960s and early 1970s, to make way for an American military base. The base, on the main island of Diego Garcia, was a launch pad for the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. (Excerpt from video.google.com)

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"The destruction of Nagasaki was officially described as having achieved "good results". These announcements and especially the words used: experiment, success, good results, to describe the unique and horrific carnage of nuclear war, were the first public examples of a new kind of propaganda. By using reassuring, even soothing language - language which allowed both the politicians and us to distance ourselves from the horror of nuclear war."

John Pilger looks at world-wide propaganda surrounding the nuclear arms race.

John Pilger's penetrating documentary which looks at world-wide propaganda surrounding the nuclear arms race. When the two American atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, they were code-named 'Fat Man' and 'Little Boy', and President Truman announced after the event: "The experiment has been an overwhelming success." "These", says Pilger, "were words used to describe the awful and horrific carnage of nuclear war. By using reassuring, even soothing language, this new kind of propaganda created acceptable images of war and the illusion that we could live securely with nuclear weapons". Official 'truths' are examined in connection with the bombing of Hiroshima, the build up of arms by Russia and America, the siting of nuclear bases by the US in Britain and Europe, Ministry of Defence statements about the Cruise missile base at Greenham Common, and other US bases, the amount of government money spent on weapons, 'Civil defence' arrangements and a NATO 'limited' nuclear and chemical war exercise in West Germany, which Pilger describes as 'a dry run for the unthinkable'. Many experts give their views, including Paul Warnke who thinks arms reduction is feasible -- 'All we need is the political will to go ahead with it'. (Excerpt from video.google.com)

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"Apartheid based on race is outlawed now, but the system always went far deeper than that. The cruelty and injustice were underwritten by an economic apartheid, which regarded people as no more than cheap expendable labor. It was backed by great business corporations in South Africa, Britain, the rest of Europe, and the United States. And it was this apartheid based on money and profit to allow a small minority to control most of the land, most of the industrial wealth, and most of the economic power. Today, the same system is called - without a trace of irony - the free market."

John Pilger was banned from South Africa for his reporting during the apartheid era. On his return thirty years later with Alan Lowery, he describes the extraordinary generosity of a liberated people, but asks who are the true beneficiaries of a democracy - the black majority or the white minority? Won the Gold Award in the category of 'Film & Video Production: Political/International Issues', Worldfest-Flagstaff, 1998; Certificate for Creative Excellence (third place), U.S. International Film & Video Festival, Elmhurst, Illinois, 1999. (Excerpt from video.google.com)

Please visit the official website for more information:
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"A Portugese colony for more than 400 years, East Timor was invaded in 1975 by Indonesia, the fifth largest nation in the world led by a military dictatorship. Indonesia has no historical nor legal claim to East Timor, yet its brutal occupation has met with mostly silence from the world's leading governments and international agencies. What happened here 18 years ago happened in secret."

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 C.I.A. 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 guerillas, as well as interviews with Timorese exiles, including Jose Ramos Horta and Jose Gusmao, and Australian, British, and Indonesian diplomats. (Excerpt from youtube.com)

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"Britain is still a world leader. Indeed it has twenty percent of a world market, second only to the United States. And this industry is considered so important by the government that it consumes almost half of all research and development funds. Strangely it produces not consumer goods that people want, but machines that hardly any of us use or want to use. Moreover, for all its preeminence, its future is uncertain and depends to a large degree on secret deals with some of the most corrupt and brutal regimes on Earth. One of the biggest manufacturing industries in Britain at the close of the century is ARMS."

John Pilger and David Munro look behind the political rhetoric and discover the world of international arms dealing. Won a Bronze Apple in the category of 'Domestic and International Concerns', National Educational Film & Video Festival, Oakland, California, 1995; Certificate of Honourable Mention in the 'International Relations' category, The Chris Awards (Columbus International Film Festival), Worthington, Ohio, 1995. (Excerpt from video.google.com)

Please visit the official website for more information:
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"The Daily Mirror was the best of them. It was a tabloid when tabloids still meant a peoples' paper that respected its readers and earned their trust and affection...This film is a personal tribute, but it's also the story of what happened to the once popular Mirror. How the reporting of the blood, sweat, and tears of ordinary people has changed out of all recognition. Above all, it's the story of a rise of a new kind of tabloid and a new kind of media power now set to dominate much of the world."

The British public were told that the new information technology, heralded by The Sun's move to Wapping, would bring a greater variety of newspapers and a more diverse media. But it produced a contracted press controlled by ever fewer proprietors. John Pilger describes the downfall of his old paper and the all-pervasive influence of Rupert Murdoch. (Excerpt from video.google.com)

Please visit the official website for more information:
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