on Democracy” and it deals with American foreign policy, as those polices were applied in Central and South America over the last fifty plus years. During an interview with Duane Claridge (the head of the CIA’s Latin American Division in the early nineteen-eighties) the following exchange takes place:

John Pilger: “What right have you; the CIA - the United States government or any foreign power: What right do you have to do what you do in other countries?”

Duane Claridge: “National Security Interests.”

JP: “But that’s a ‘Divine Right’ isn’t it—because the people that you do it to have no say in this.”

DC: “Well that’s just tough – we are gonna protect ourselves and we’re gonna go on protecting ourselves, cause we end up protecting all of you. And let’s not forget that! We’ll intervene whenever we decide it’s in our National Security interests to intervene—and if you don’t like it—lump it!

Git used to it world, we’re not gonna put up with nonsense. If our interests are threatened we’re gonna do it!”

Of course a lot of Americans might think that “National Security” involves a whole lot more than just stealing other people’s countries or killing anyone that does not agree to be taken over. Real national security ought to be based on the welfare of the entire population and not merely on the phenomenal criminal wealth of those international elites that benefit directly from these fascistically brutal policies.

Blind arrogance was the reason why the world outlawed many of the policies and practices of this administration, decades before Cheney-Bush was born. But the facts of law and international policy have never bothered these extremists—these new American Capitalists that have appointed themselves to rule the planet. What this government has become, in their zeal to complete their Empire, has taught them to use fascism to force political changes in the world: That’s the Fascism that Cheney-Bush calls ‘democracy.’

With the coming of the North American Union the White House now wants to bring the kinds of changes, which the film clearly illustrates, to Canada and Mexico as well as to what used to be the United States. This might prove to be much tougher than they think.

The film covers the CIA attack upon Chile: launched on September 11, 1973. This brutal invasion was called a “coup d’etat” and it brought back the Inquisition – this time to overthrow a democratically elected government. After beginning under Pinochet as a fascist dictatorship in the seventies, Chile was selected in the 1980’s to become the new American model for conquered nation-states. ‘On the surface everything seemed ‘normal’—modern, prosperous—but life had been privatized and the rich are getting richer.’ This: thanks to Milton Friedman and his “Chicago Boys” who restructured Chile’s economy and called it “Shock Therapy.” Chile today appears to be the new model for privatization that will be used to undercut Canada and Mexico and the USA if the NAU becomes a fact. That’s why the history matters in Pilger’s film. What came to Latin America unbidden—is about to come back to haunt the people of the ‘United’ States who have profited directly from these same crimes for so many decades.

However The War on Democracy also shows how the USA and it’s partisan institutions have been stopped in Latin America—Big-time—on at least two occasions.

In Venezuela, in 2002 the ordinary people rejected the American backed Coup against Chavez. They came out from their slums in their tens of thousands and demanded the return of their elected leader. The military changed sides to join them, and Hugo Chavez was returned to his presidential palace.

In 2000 the people of Bolivia fought the American company Bechtel that had privatized their water—and the people of the streets finally won.

In 2003—those same Bolivian people finally took back their country from the American puppet that had been running it, when they descended in their tens of thousands from the slums to overwhelmingly elect one of their own: Eva Morales to the presidency. All in all this film presents us with a lot to think about, in these times, where the new fascists are now seeking to bring their dreams of privatization to all of North America.

If this policy were being inflicted anywhere else, it would be pawned off on the resistant people as just another mandatory regime-change. But if the ordinary populations of these three nations that comprise North America, do not firmly resist this brutal sham of privatization, then the NAU will become every bit as subservient as Chile has been for all of the thirty-four years that they have remained an artificially-created slave-state. (1)

There are two other massive crimes that were used against the people of the United States: These did not directly create the climate in which our criminal Latin American policies were formed—but their existence undermined all the laws of this country—because they illegally imposed taxes upon the citizens of the US and almost simultaneously gave away our ability to print and control our own money to a foreign consortium of international bankers. This ‘Jekyll Island deal’ resulted in the illegal-creation of the Federal Reserve.

The film by Aaron Russo speaks for itself. Aaron died yesterday, but his legacy gave the people of the United States some critically absent facts, that we might use, to take back much of what has been stolen from all of us. (2)