Back and to the Left: Springtime for Oliver Stone
Ron Radosh appears in the latest edition of Poliwood with Roger L. Simon and Lionel Chetwynd to discuss Oliver Stone’s revisionist — to say the least! — history series. Ron has an article in the Weekly Standard which explores the topic further:
Two years ago, Oliver Stone announced that he was preparing to make a documentary about recent American history. It premieres on the CBS-owned cable network Showtime on November 12. Titled Oliver Stone’s Untold History of the United States, it is written by Stone and historian Peter Kuznick and narrated and directed by Stone. The series reflects the view Stone expressed in 2010 that the Soviet Union’s leader in the 1930s and ’40s, Joseph Stalin, has “been vilified pretty thoroughly by history,” so what is needed is a program allowing viewers to walk in both his and Hitler’s shoes “to understand their point of view.”
That last quote comes from an article in The Hollywood Reporter from early 2010:
“Stalin, Hitler, Mao, McCarthy — these people have been vilified pretty thoroughly by history,” Stone told reporters at the Television Critics Association’s semi-annual press tour in Pasadena.
“Stalin has a complete other story,” Stone said. “Not to paint him as a hero, but to tell a more factual representation. He fought the German war machine more than any single person. We can’t judge people as only ‘bad’ or ‘good.’ Hitler is an easy scapegoat throughout history and its been used cheaply. He’s the product of a series of actions. It’s cause and effect … People in America don’t know the connection between WWI and WWII … I’ve been able to walk in Stalin’s shoes and Hitler’s shoes to understand their point of view.”
Mel Brooks’ classic film The Producers — a satire for the rest of us; a how-to guide for Oliver Stone. Did Bialystock and Bloom produce Stone’s miniseries?
LIEBKIND
I vas vit him a great deal, you know.
BIALYSTOCK
With whom?
LIEBKIND
(astonished by the question)
Vit the Fuhrer, of course. He liked me. Out of all the household staff at Berchtesgarten, I vas his favorite. I vas the only one allowed into his chambers at bedtime.
BIALYSTOCK
No kidding?
LIEBKIND
Oh, sure. I used to take him his hot milk and his opium. Achhh, those were the days. Vat good times ve had. Dinner parties vit lovely ladies and gentlemen, singing und dancing. You know, not many people knew about it, but the Fuhrer vas a terrific dancer.
BIALYSTOCK
Really, I never dreamed ...
LIEBKIND
(flies into an indignant rage)
That's because you were taken in by that verdampter Allied propaganda. Such filthy lies. But nobody said a bad vord about Winston Churchill, did they? Oh no, Vin Vit Vinnie!(he gestures V for victory) Churchill, vit his cigars and his brandy and his rotten paintings. Couldn't even say Nazi. He would say Narzis, Narzis. Ve vere not Narzies, ve vere Nazis. But let me tell this, and you're getting it straight from the horse, Hitler vas better looking than Churchill, he vas a better dresser than Churchill, had more hair, told funnier jokes, and could dance the pants off Churchill!
BIALYSTOCK
(swinging along)
That's exactly why we want to do this play. To show the world the true Hitler, the Hitler you knew, the Hitler you loved, the Hitler with a song in his heart.
BIALYSTOCK (CONT'D)
(to Bloom)
Leo, quick, the contract.
BLOOM QUICKLY WHIPS THE CONTRACT OUT OF HIS POCKET, PRODUCES A PEN, HANDS THEM TO BIALYSTOCK. BIALYSTOCK SPREADS THE CONTRACT OUT ON THE TABLE BEFORE LIEBKIND.
BIALYSTOCK
Here, sign here, Franz Liebkind. And make your dream a reality.
Stone’s mini-series is also the latest lefty reclamation project for the legacy of former FDR veep Henry Wallace, Radosh writes:
According to his own testimony, if he had become president, Wallace would have made Harry Dexter White his secretary of the Treasury and given a position in government to Laurence Duggan. Both men were Soviet agents. As a KGB cable found in the Venona archives shows, the Soviets hoped that Duggan would aid them “by using his friendship” with Wallace for “extracting . . . interesting information.”
Instead, of course, Roosevelt replaced Wallace with Harry Truman on the Democratic ticket in 1944, and named Wallace secretary of commerce. FDR died on April 12, 1945, and in September 1946, President Truman fired Wallace. The provocation was a speech Wallace gave at a Madison Square Garden rally in which, contrary to administration policy, he called for recognizing Soviet spheres of influence—in effect, occupation zones—as just and necessary. Stone endorses Wallace’s support for turning the nations of Eastern Europe into Soviet pawns, arguing that what Wallace favored was no different from the Russians’ recognition of American influence in the Western hemisphere. Failing to distinguish between democracies and totalitarian regimes, Stone consistently portrays the Soviet Union as the victim of American imperialism, while regarding the monster Stalin as a peaceful leader who sought only to gain valid security guarantees on his borders.
“Say what you like about Harry S Truman,” Moe Lane adds, but “Truman had one hell of an advantage: he wasn’t Henry Wallace. We dodged one monstrously large bullet, there.”
In his Weekly Standard article, Radosh concludes:
No one put the truth about Wallace better than Dwight Macdonald, who wrote in his delightfully wicked 1948 exegesis Henry Wallace: The Man and the Myth that Wallaceland was “a region of perpetual fogs, caused by the warm winds of the liberal Gulf Stream coming in contact with the Soviet glacier.” In the 21st century, Oliver Stone still lives in that perpetual fog.
A couple of years ago, I picked up the DVD edition of Britain’s classic World at War series from the early 1970s. Watching all of the episodes for the first time since it ran on American TV in the mid-1970s, I was reminded that it was made at precisely the right time. Television techniques were by then sufficiently evolved that the story could be told in a visually competent fashion — the documentarians at Thames Television didn’t have computer animation to aid their production, for example, and the 16mm film stock they used to shoot their hours of interviews looks more than a little grainy on an HD TV today. But all of that pales in comparison to the simple fact that the West still had confidence in their victory.
As I was watching the World At War, I couldn’t help but begin to wonder how it would play if it were made in the age of Political Correctness, postmodernism and Black Armband History.
Now we know.
What Stone conveniently forgets is the reason that Stalin fought Hitler was because Hitler attacked him. Otherwise, he was content to split Eastern Europe.
“We can’t judge people as only ‘bad’ or ‘good.’”
Oh, no, perish the thought. I’m sure Stalin and the rest of the butchers loved their mothers. Pray, Oliver, just how ‘bad’ does one have to be before you really *do* tilt the scales in that direction? Tens of millions dead? Hundreds of millions enslaved? Just how high does the body count have to go?
I rather suspect it’ll never be high enough. Because what truly matters to a storyteller is their “point of view”, which is scrupulously neutral. Brutal death and enslavement are mere abstractions that don’t fit the narrative.
If only the imperialistic FDR had kept Wallace as his running mate in 1944, the decidedly NOT imperialistic Soviet Union would never had invaded the dastardly, encirling Finland in 1939 and pried away soveriegn territory; invaded, occupied, and annexed whole the three threatening Baltic States bullies of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania (also in 1939); invaded and annexed whole Japan’s Sakhalin island (thereby displacing the indigenous Ainu aborigines) in 1945; and Putin’s neo-Soviet Russia would never have invaded and annexed great swatches of Georgia in 2006.
After all, the small amount of land grabbed by poor picked-on Soviet and post-Soviet Russia since 1939 (only defensively, you understand!) hardly compares to immense territory the imperialist evil-bad-nasty USA added to its fiefdom after WWII.
Oh, wait. Not only did the USA not seize territory as spoils of WWII, it reliquished ownership of the Phillipines soon after. Just who’s the imperialist bully again? And just what’s the definition of ‘imperialist?’ I’m confused, Oliver!
I’m not sure whether Oliver Stone falls under the description ‘fellow traveller’ or ‘useful idiot’. Since his is such a clodhopping, circumscribed intellect, I suspect the latter. It’s a mark of pseudo-sophistication to pretend nuance where none exists. Stalin was a monster in charge of a vampire nation. This may seem simplistic; it is a good deal more intelligent than Stone’s vacuous moral relativism. The knots that people like him have to tie themselves in to support tyrants (as long as they’re the right sort of tyrant) is evinced spectacularly in the overnight volte-face Soviet supporters had to make when the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was rendered moot by Operation Barbarossa.
What nonsense, it was the Ribbentrov-Molotov Pact that enabled Hitler to continue to rearm and point his aggression to the West. Not to mention, Stalin was paralized during the initial phases of Operation Barbarossa and it was Hitler’s incompetence, along with a horrible Soviet winter in 1941, that allowed the Soviets to keep the Wehrmacht in check long enough for a few Soviet Generals Stalin hadn’t murdered, to encircle the Sixth Army.
Stone is a drug addled, geriatric hippie idiot who needs to be ignored.
It is not even true… I was taught the connections between WWI and WWII… and that the US walked out of the peace negotiations for WWI because of what would become the connections.
“Stalin, Hitler, Mao, McCarthy — these people have been vilified pretty thoroughly by history,” Stone told reporters at the Television Critics Association’s semi-annual press tour in Pasadena.
McCarthy? McCarthy the equal of Hitler? With Stalin? With Mao? A Yale/NYU education pays off.
Der Fuehrer loved his dog Blondi, got along well with the Goebbels children and was a great dancer. On the other hand he launched a monstrous war, exterminated millions and left Germany in ruins. It’s need an easy thing to strike a balance. We all must learn to tolerate ambiguities.
And don’t forget he killed only a few of his friends. Stalin killed all of his friends.
He fought the German war machine more than any single person.
Yeah, those 20 million soviets that died were just a bunch of lazy bums compared to Stalin.
Stone seems to be closing the circle neatly for Jonah Goldberg’s “Liberal Fascism.”
The correct label for the people in charge of the modern Democrat party is the Wallaceite faction. They didn’t go away after 1944. They dug in and took control of the party in 1972, and have been purging Trumanites, like Joe Lieberman, ever since.
Henry would have been proud of Hussein.
Who killed more people, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Rachel Carson or Margaret Sanger?
Just asking.
The Germans and the Russians partitioned Poland before World War II. After the war the Eastern Polish Border was the same as it was when Stalin and Hitler did the negotiating.
Stone: Useful idiot.
Stalin and Hitler fought because they were the two biggest dictators on the block. Indeed, most German officers interviewed after the war insisted that BARBAROSSA was thought of at the time as a preemptive strike.
Stalin won his war because American and British supplies enabled the Red Army to become a fully mobile force after Kursk. That’s the only thing that made operations like BAGRATION possible.
Fellow Travelers like Stone will never tell you this.