Film review
 
Venezuelans show their support for democratically elected President Hugo Chavez (right) in Caracas, Venezuela, earlier this month. Chavez, who aims to improve the lives of the majority of Venezuelans who live in poverty by redistributing the nation's unfairly distributed oil wealth, faced a right-wing coup attempt in April 2002 in which a rich oil executive was installed as the new president. The people revolted and Chavez was returned to power within a couple of days. The short-lived coup is dramatically depicted in the documentary film "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised."
Chavez now faces a recall election orchestrated by the same right-wing forces that tried to unlawfully, undemocratically, forcibly overthrow him in 2002. Just as Republicans in the United States never got over the fact that Democrat Bill Clinton was democratically elected in 1992 and tried unsuccessfully to remove him, right-wingers in Venezuela have never gotten over the fact that Chavez was democratically elected in 1998 and are doing everything in their power to remove him and to return the rule of Venezuela to the aristocrats, who would get even richer off the nation's oil wealth while the masses continue to suffer in poverty. (Associated Press photos)
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
The documentary "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" chronicles the short-lived April 2002 coup of democratically elected Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez (he was elected in 1998 by a landslide) by Venezuela's equivalent of Republicans -- right-wingers pissed off over the fact that Chavez was democratically elected and that his policies favor the common Venezuelan, not the overprivileged elite, and that Chavez doesn't kiss U.S. ass.
Chavez's cardinal sin, in the eyes of his right-wing opponents, is the redistribution of the nation's oil wealth to help improve the lives of the 80 percent of Venezuelans who live in poverty.
In sickening scenes, we see rich right-wing Venezuelans, most of whom appear to be of aristocratic Spanish (i.e., white) blood, actually claim before the camera that Venezuela's poor (who are mostly non-white) haven't struggled enough, like they have, and therefore they, the whiter, richer Venezuelans, should control the nation's government and wealth, and we see them in secret meetings in which they advise each other to watch their servants, who might be spies for Chavez, and to keep guns in their homes in case they have to shoot poorer Venezuelans if the poorer Venezuelans should revolt and come after them.
The right-wing coup leaders -- who probably were, as Chavez's supporters claim in the film's footage, supported by the Central Intelligence Agency -- immediately install an unelected right-wing president of their own, rich oil executive Pedro Carmona; abolish Venezuela's constitution; and dissolve the nation's elected legislative body. You know, what the Republicans would do in the United States if they could get away with it. (Wait a minute -- they did get away with installing a president whom the people did not elect, and they've at least shit and pissed all over the U.S. Constitution. And Republican-orchestrated redistricting in order to favor the Republican Party is a serious subversion of the democratic legislative process.)
The people of Venezuela -- the majority of whom voted for Chavez and who support him -- rise up against the newly forcibly installed, unelected right-wing government. They prevail and Chavez is restored to his rightful power within a couple of days. The anti-democratic right-wing coup leaders -- who are fucking traitors and criminals -- don't get what they deserve, which is at least life in prison for the loss of life that they caused in their unlawful subversion of democracy -- their treason -- but the fact that Chavez does not take revenge upon them demonstrates that he is not the tyrant that the right-wingers accuse him of being.
The Bush regime denied any involvement in the failed right-wing coup of Venezuela's democratically elected government, but the United States' oily fingerprints are all over it, and the Bush regime clearly gave at least its moral support, if not also practical support, to the coup. (There are clips of former CIA Director George Tenet and former Bush spokesweasel Ari Fleischer -- whose lying tongue I'd still like to rip from his throat and shove up his ass -- at least tacitly praising the coup.)
It's no coinky-dink that Venezuela is the world's fourth- or fifth-largest oil producer (depending upon your source), producing 14 percent of the oil consumed by the United States.
And, I might add, what happened to traitor and criminal Pedro Carmona? He is now living in Miami, Florida, where all Latinos who try, unsuccessfully, to sell out their own people to the United States seem to end up. No, the Bush regime had nothing to do with the attempt to overthrow a democratically elected government that refused to kiss U.S. ass, especially where oil is concerned, I'm sure.
The film's title is a reference to the fact that the coup probably could not have taken place without the aid and abetment of Venezuela's private television networks -- owned by oil companies -- that broadcast anti-Chavez content and propaganda. (Chavez, allegedly an evil dictator, allowed the networks an unprecedented amount of free speech, and had at his disposal only the state-owned television network, which the coup members disabled during the coup.)
The plutocratically owned TV networks' blatant lies to the Venezuelan people about the events before, during and after the failed coup, which the filmmakers expose -- such as the blatant lie that Chavez resigned, when he never resigned but was forcibly carted off to and detained at an island -- are chilling. And they remind us Americans of the dangers of the plutocratically owned media in the United States, which increasingly serve the interests of their wealthy owners and others of the ruling class at the expense of the American people. (For a study of this -- specifically, the American corporately controlled media's failure to responsibly cover the 2003 U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq, see the excellent documentary "Control Room," which I have seen and will review here shortly.)
The makers of "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised," who are Irish, had set out to make a documentary film about Chavez and had no idea that the coup would take place. The documentarians gained surprisingly free access to film the coup as it unfolded, and the dramatic story unfolds better than could any Hollywood script.
My grade: A rare A+
Click here to go to the film's Web site.
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