Pilger celebrates the life of Lisette Talate and her never-ending battle to recover and return to her island paradise, the Chagos Islands. In 1971 in a deal with the US government, the British cleared the island of its inhabitants and leased it to the US. Since renamed Diego Garcia, it was turned into a giant, and strategically important airbase that the Empire uses to inflict violence on those who resist its demands in Eurasia.
What was done to Lisette's paradise has an urgent and universal meaning, for it represents the violent, ruthless nature of a whole system behind its democratic facade, and the scale of our own indoctrination to its messianic assumptions, described by Harold Pinter as a "brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis." Longer and bloodier than any war since 1945, waged with demonic weapons and a gangsterism dressed as economic policy and sometimes known as globalisation, the war on democracy is unmentionable in western elite circles.
