From johnpilger.com:
“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.”

Paying the Price: Killing the Children of Iraq is a powerful indictment of the largely unreported effects of United Nations sanctions following the 1991 Gulf War – most strikingly, the 500,000 children among more than one million Iraqis who died in almost 10 years of sanctions, figures verified by UNICEF (the United Nations Children’s Fund) and other UN agencies.

John Pilger describes it as “the most comprehensive embargo in modern history against a country” and asks why 21 million people are “being punished for the crimes of a dictator, Saddam Hussein”. Iraq, which in 1989 had one of the lowest infant mortality rates in the world, as well as universal, free healthcare and education, now has one of the highest. Remarkably, the United States and Britain are continuing to bomb Iraq almost every day, with civilians accounting for a third of the casualties.

Paying the Price is dominated by scenes of malnourished and dying Iraqi children whose treatment is affected by the intermittent supply of drugs while clean water, fresh food, soap, paper, pencils, books and light bulbs are no longer available or extremely limited in supply.

In a Baghdad cancer clinic, Denis Halliday – who in 1998 resigned from the UN over the sanctions and intervened personally to save the lives of some children – tells Pilger: “I think in this hospital we’ve seen today evidence of the killing that is now the responsibility of the Security Council member states, particularly, I think, Bill Clinton and Tony Blair.” American Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, previously asked on American television whether the deaths of more than 500,000 children was a price worth paying, answered: “We think the price is worth it.”

In the south of the country, Pilger reports on another lethal result of the Gulf War, which followed Sadam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990. The Americans used depleted uranium in shells and missiles fired by their tanks and aircraft. Wind and dust carried the radiation across the towns and villages of southern Iraq, creating what one specialist describes as “a cancer epidemic that is likely to strike almost half the population”. The embargo has denied Iraq the equipment and expertise needed to clean up the former battlefields, as well as the technology for diagnosing cancer and drugs for treating it.

Claims of Saddam Hussein possessing weapons of mass destruction – the justification for sanctions – are untrue, says Scott Ritter, a former chief UN weapons inspector in Iraq. “By 1998, the chemical weapons infrastructure had been completely dismantled or destroyed,” he explains, adding that biological, nuclear and long-range ballistic missile weapons programmes had also been “eliminated”.

In an empty Security Council chamber at the UN, Pilger concludes: “Do the representatives of the powerful who sit here in the Security Council ever think beyond their so-called interests and manoeuvres and about their victims, small children dying needlessly half a world away? It’s time we reclaimed the United Nations. While you’ve been watching this film, countless children have died silently in Iraq. How many more will die before the silence is broken?

1.18GB | 1h 14m | 706×480 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/64D7B5B162BE71A/Paying.the.Price.Killing.the.Children.of.Iraq.(Alan.Lowery.John.Pilger.2000).DVDRip.mkv

Language(s):English
Subtitles:None

The post Alan Lowery & John Pilger – Paying the Price: Killing the Children of Iraq (2000) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

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The documentary investigates George W Bush’s “war on terror”. In “liberated” Afghanistan, America has its military base and pipeline access, while the people have the warlords who are, says one women, “in many ways worse than the Taliban”. In Washington, a series of remarkable interviews includes senior Bush officials and former intelligence officers. In the week that the Hutton inquiry into the death of the British scientist Dr David Kelly releases its report, a former senior CIA official tells Pilger that the whole issue of weapons of mass destruction was “95 per cent charade”.

261MB | 51m 57s | 640×368 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/53098EB33B1DAC4/Breaking.the.Silence.Truth.and.Lies.in.the.War.on.Terror.2003.WEB.mkv

Language(s):English
Subtitles:None

The post Steve Connelly & John Pilger – Breaking the Silence: Truth and Lies in the War on Terror (2003) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

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When the United States, the world’s biggest military power, decided that China, the second largest economic power, was a threat to its imperial dominance, two-thirds of US naval forces were transferred to Asia and the Pacific. This was the ‘pivot to Asia’, announced by President Barack Obama in 2011. China, which in the space of a generation had risen from the chaos of Mao Zedong’s ‘Cultural Revolution’ to an economic prosperity that has seen more than 500 million people lifted out of poverty, was suddenly the United States’s new enemy.

The build-up of naval forces would reinforce the US’s already overwhelmingly superior military position in the region. Seldom referred to in the Western media, 400 American bases surround China with ships, missiles and troops, in an arc that extends from Australia north through the Pacific to Japan, Korea and across Eurasia to Afghanistan and India.

The Coming War on China is John Pilger’s most recent film – his 60th documentary and arguably his most prescient. Completed in the month Donald Trump was elected US President, the film investigates the manufacture of a ‘threat’ and the beckoning of a nuclear confrontation.

The film is marked in chapters. Chapter 1 is set in the remote Marshall Islands, in the Pacific, which the United States took over as a United Nations ‘trust territory’ in 1945 with an obligation to ‘protect the population’s health and wellbeing’. From 1946 to 1958, the US exploded the equivalent of one Hiroshima bomb every day in the islands, contaminating its people and environment.

Filming on irradiated Bikini Atoll, which cannot be safely inhabited today, perhaps ever, Pilger describes the testing in 1954 of the world’s first hydrogen bomb, codenamed Bravo, which vaporised an entire island, leaving a dark chasm a mile wide in Bikini’s beautiful lagoon. The inhabitants had been moved to a nearby atoll, Rongelap, where the ‘unexpected’ fallout endowed them with multiple cancers.

Declassified documents describe a secret programme originally designed to test the effects of radiation on mice and used in the Marshall Islands on human beings. A US Atomic Energy official of the time describes the island of Rongelap as ‘by far the most contaminated place on Earth’.

The human guinea pigs were regularly monitored and underwent scientific examination. Many suffered thyroid cancer, deformities appeared in babies and countless survivors of the original blast died from radiation poisoning. A claims tribunal was set up and quickly ran out of money. The most moving interviews in the film are with islanders, mostly elderly women, who have survived, precariously, in poverty.

Today, the largest of the Marshall Islands, Kwajalein, is home to one of the United States’s most secretive bases, a missile launch pad designed as a ‘stepping stone to Asia and beyond’ and aimed at China.

Chapter 2 describes China’s remarkable rise. Using rare archive film, Pilger describes ‘the century of humiliation’, when the Chinese were depicted as the ‘yellow peril’ in the West and racial stereotypes were a staple of Hollywood. Author James Bradley describes the opium trade and the colonisation by Britain and the other imperial powers. ‘The American industrial revolution was funded by huge pools of money… from illegal drugs in the biggest market in the world, China,’ he says.

The 1949 Communist revolution marked the end of foreign exploitation but also, ironically, the beginning of a China that almost no ‘expert’ in the West had predicted. ‘Today,’ says Pilger, standing against the ultra-modern skyline of Shanghai, ‘China has matched America at its own great game of capitalism – and that is unforgivable.’

Four hundred miles away, on the Japanese island of Okinawa, 32 American military installations form the front line of a coming war with China. Fumiko Shimabukuro, aged 87, is one of the leaders of a non-violent resistance challenging Washington’s ‘pivot to Asia’. They want the bases closed and point to a warning from the past. In 1962, during the Cuban missile crisis, American nuclear missiles were ordered to be launched at China, Russia and North Korea by an officer who, it appears, had lost his mind. Only luck – and the vigilance of another officer – allowed his moment of madness to be countermanded. In a memorable sequence, one of the 1962 missile crew describes how the world was almost destroyed ‘by mistake’.

In 2015, Pilger reports, the US Navy and its regional allies, including Australia, rehearsed a blockade that would cut China’s lifelines of oil, trade and raw materials. Today, President Trump is waging a trade war against China, where the United States’s biggest companies, such as Apple, are based: the source of a trade deficit for which China is cast, in Trump’s world, as the ‘bad guy’. In the meantime, China has built military airstrips in the disputed Spratly Islands, in the South China Sea, and is reported to have placed its nuclear missiles on ‘high alert’.

The Coming War on China was broadcast on ITV in the UK and SBS in Australia, and seen in many other countries, including China, where a pirated version was shown to possibly its biggest audience. ‘It’s not the fairest way to distribute a film,’ said Pilger, ‘but I was delighted. The true story of China and America needs to be told, especially in Australia, where, fuelled by America, an anti-China propaganda campaign seems to be inviting a military reaction.’

1.50GB | 1h 51m | 1024×576 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/56C7057A1FA5C68/The_Coming_War_on_China_(2016)_-_DVD.mkv

Language(s):English
Subtitles:English hardcoded (when needed)

The post John Pilger – The Coming War on China (2016) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian
John Pilger’s angry story of how a rapacious US covertly brutalised its Latin American neighbours should be a compelling documentary. And so it often is, despite being marred by a dewy-eyed interview with President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, which has moments of almost Hello!-magazine deference. Pilger does not try to be a comedian like the Michael Moore generation; austerely, he recounts the shabby tale of how the postwar United States set about doing what we failed to do with Nasser over Suez: namely, remove inconvenient nationalisers in small countries, using phoney pretexts cooked up with the help of compliant media – what’s now known as “spin”. All over South America, the US found ways of toppling democratically elected leaders, replacing them with brutal strongmen who would protect US interests.

Pilger makes no secret of his own admiration for Chávez, a Bolivarian hero who has had the effrontery to survive without kowtowing to the mighty superpower. But how about Chávez’s decision to bypass the National Assembly for 18 months, and rule by decree? Pilger passes over it very lightly. Maybe he thinks that questioning Chávez on this point would be playing into the hands of the smearmongers. Maybe. But he’s in dereliction of his journalistic duty, just the same. Perhaps history will see Chávez as Latin America’s Boris Yeltsin – a romantic nationalist who faced down a global bully with one glorious flourish of political genius. But however posterity depicts him, the truth of Pilger’s overall story is plain enough.

1.84GB | 1h 32m | 1280×720 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/1535125B33C3C8A/The.War.on.Democracy.2007.720p.WEBRip.AAC2.0.H.264-HRiP.mkv

Language(s):English
Subtitles:English (hardcoded for non-English parts)

The post John Pilger – The War On Democracy (2007) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
Pilger tells a story literally ‘hidden from history’.

In the 1960s and 70s, British governments, conspiring with American officials, tricked into leaving, then expelled the entire population of the Chagos islands in the Indian Ocean.

The aim was to give the principal island of this Crown Colony, Diego Garcia, to the Americans who wanted it as a major military base. Indeed, from Diego Garcia US planes have since bombed Afghanistan and Iraq.

The story is told by islanders who were dumped in the slums of Mauritius and in the words of the British officials who left a ‘paper trail’ of what the International Criminal Court now describes as ‘a crime against humanity’ .

‘Stealing a Nation’ has won both the Royal Television Society’s top award as Britain’s best documentary in 2004-5, and a ‘Chris Award’ at the Columbus International Film and Video Festival.

Also included is John Pilger in conversation with Anthony Hayward at the Guardian Hay Festival 2006

https://nitro.download/view/2ECA52D1272B3CC/John_Pilger_at_the_Guardian_Hay_Festival_2006.avi
https://nitro.download/view/173A82D11F3C4AD/Stealing_a_Nation.avi

Language(s):English
Subtitles:None

The post John Pilger – Stealing a Nation (2004) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

The newest documentary from, probably, the world’s greatest living journalist- John Pilger- looks at the “dysfunctional relationship” that Australians have developed with the indigenous Aborigines.

He takes a short look at the history of colonization and explores how this this blatantly racist sociological driving force has affected Aboriginal peoples, and the conditions they live in, to this day.

Pilger is confrontational and gets some of his interviewees pretty riled up- particularly the Minister for Aboriginal Issues.

A microcosm of the macrocosm, as this is happening to indigenous peoples all over the world. We can certainly see similar circumstances manifesting themselves here in Canada.

A very sad and disturbing glimpse at reality.

Utopia.2013.720p.WEB-DL.AAC2.0.H.264-VCNTRSH.mkv

General
Container:	Matroska
Runtime:	1h 54mn
Size:	2.91 GiB
Video
Codec:	h264
Resolution:	1280x720
Aspect ratio:	16:9
Frame rate:	24.000 fps
Bit rate:	3 436 kb/s
Audio
English 2.0ch AAC LC @ 192 kb/s

https://nitro.download/view/1F0AB93B53CBE3E/Utopia.2013.720p.WEB-DL.AAC2.0.H.264-VCNTRSH.mkv

Language(s):English
Subtitles:None

The post John Pilger & Alan Lowery – Utopia (2013) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

After being banned from South Africa thirty years earlier for his reporting during the apartheid era, award winning filmmaker and journalist John Pilger goes back with Alan Lowey to witness the benefits that democracy has brought to its people. Pilger questions to what extent has the black majority benefited from the democratic changes in comparison to the white minority.

Awards: 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.

https://nitro.download/view/33BD03F41152CDA/Apartheid_did_not_die.avi

Language:English

The post John Pilger – Apartheid Did Not Die (1998) first appeared on Cinema of the World.