"PROMESAS ROTAS" es la traducción del título del documental que el actor Ron Silver acaba de sacar en DVD (sí, el que había votado toda su vida al partido demócrata pero que apareció en la convención del partido republicano). No os extrañe que el tema me interese:

Actor Ron Silver says he has had fewer movie offers and dinner invitations since he parted political company with his Hollywood colleagues and spoke at the Republican National Convention last year.

But he is sinking his teeth into his new role: conservative activist. Today, Silver will release a documentary on DVD called "Broken Promises," a scathing criticism of what Silver considers the failures of the United Nations on its 60th anniversary. It follows on the heels of a DVD retort last year by Silver to Michael Moore called "Fahren-hype 911," carefully named so it would be placed on video store shelves right next to Moore's anti-Bush documentary, "Fahrenheit 9/11."

"Broken Promises" has at its root the betrayed vision of an idealistic youth from the Lower East Side. Silver grew up in a modest Jewish neighborhood, and his way to escape his parochial world, where everyone was defined by ethnicity and race, he says, was to go to the U.N. and just wander around.

"When I took that bus uptown and I saw those flags lined up on 1st Avenue, it opened up an entirely new world to me," he said. "There was such a sense of pride I felt."

But over the years, that pride turned to disappointment, even anger, as he witnessed the U.N. repeatedly fall short of its noble goals, he said.

[...] There are interviews with peacekeepers on the failures of peacekeeping, including Canadian Gen. Romeo Dallaire, who wrote the famously ignored "genocide memo" months before nearly 1 million Rwandans were killed, in which he begged for reinforcements. Rwandan survivor Eugenie Mukeshimana appears 10 years later with the daughter she gave birth to in a container while hiding from machete-wielding Hutu killers. Former U.N. translator Hasan Nuhanovic describes how U.N. officers in Srebrenica ordered him to tell his family himself that they must leave the U.N. haven to face death by the Serbs.

One of the most stirring comments comes from Kenneth Cain, a civilian peacekeeper who co-wrote a book titled "Emergency Sex" about what Cain views as U.N. betrayals. It is liberals like him who should be most aggrieved, he says, because it is their ideals that have been most harshly sundered.

Cain's comments seem to echo Silver's undertone of personal affront at the injustices he sees as perpetrated by the institution meant to uphold justice and freedom. It is this sense that makes him, as he says, a "progressive conservative," or "a liberal who is just left of the right of center." Or, as someone who also believes in gay rights, healthcare and the right to choose, he would rather just dispense with labels altogether.

He crossed the political aisle, Silver says, after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, reawakened his belief that the United States must use its power to reinforce universal ideals. After being a vocal Democrat, he was suddenly the darling of the right, and in 2004 he spoke at the Republican National Convention in support of President Bush.

"It sounds like a conversion tale, but I was not reborn," Silver said. "It was fairly consistent with my views in the past. I've been a very aggressive liberal interventionist in my foreign policy feelings. I have felt for a long time that the withdrawal of American power was far more dangerous than getting involved."