Is Oliver Stone today’s Walter Duranty?
embedded by Embedded Video
YouTube Direkt
I wasn’t going to write about Oliver Stone’s recent Mel Gibson (“Yes, I can be an anti-Semite too!”) imitation, even though I — once upon a time in a universe far far away — knew Oliver pretty well. Frankly, I was too disgusted and didn’t want to add my tiny bit to the filmmaker’s pathological, never-ending search for publicity — or is it notoriety? And when it comes to exonerating Hitler, I prefer Mel Brooks.
But Oliver has now apologized, sort of, and the brouhaha seems to be dying down — at least until his Showtime series informing us brainwashed unwashed of what Stone considers the real secret truth of America, or should I say Amerikkka, makes it to the air (if it does).
I can’t wait. It’s sort of like history as told by Captain Queeg. (Okay, I take it back. I don’t think I will watch — especially if it interferes with more important programming like the Real Housewives of New Jersey.)
But speaking of “real,” the real story here is and was Showtime, not Stone, whose multiple derangement syndromes are well-known, and not just from my book. Just why would this company, a CBS subsidiary, be so desperate as to want to finance the filmmaker’s puerile paranoid fantasies?
Well, the bottom line is the bottom line, but imagine the company’s consternation when they realized they had something akin to a Holocaust denier on their hands. Being “Edgy” has always been considered good business in Hollywood, but this was One Edge Too Far. I would bet my house, most of it anyway, that Stone heard from the folks at Showtime (either directly or, more likely, via his agent) post haste after his Protocols of Zionish statements about Jews controlling the world appeared in the London Times, hitting the global Internet almost immediately; hence the speedy retraction.
Will this be the last we see of Oliver the way it may be for Gibson? No such luck, I’m afraid. Like a pretentious, pseudo-leftist Energizer Bunny, he will just keep on coming. An ego that size cannot be denied. It can latch on to anything. Last year Scientology, this year Hugo Chavez. Who knows what or who will be next?
“In a way Stone reminds me of one of the great media villains of the Twentieth Century, Walter Duranty.”
Walter Duranty was an unambiguous liar. He was very well aware of his deceitfulness. Duranty would tell some of his journalist friends the truth concerning the starvation in the Urkrane—and then write the exact opposite within the pages of the New York Times. Duranty never believed his own bovine excrement. Oliver Stone, on the other hand, is a postmodernist. He embraces the notion that objective truth doesn’t really exist and one should instead remain loyal to a leftist narrative. Understanding this distinction is of utmost importance. Our civilization is threatened today by those unable to distinguish between truth and falsehood.
” Our civilization is threatened today by those unable to distinguish between truth and falsehood. ”
* * * * * * *
” The rapid changes on both a technological and sociological level will result in a great social upheaval. The cataclysmic changes will result in considerable suffering, often referred to as the Hevlei Mashiah or Birthpangs of the Messiah. If the Messiah comes with miracles, these “birthpangs” may be avoided, but the great changes involved in his coming in the manner adopted by Maimonides may make these terrible travails inevitable.
Since in a period of such accelerated change parents and children will grow up in literally different worlds, traditions handed from father to son will be among the major casualties. The Talmud describes at length how there will be general dissatisfaction with the values of religion-in such a rapidly changing world, people will naturally be enamored with the new and dissatisfied with the old. Thus, the sages teach that neither parents nor the aged will be respected, the old will have to seek favors from the young, and a man’s household will become his enemies. Insolence will increase, people will no longer have respect, and none will offer reproof. Religious studies will be despised and used by nonbelievers to strengthen their cause, the government will become godless, academies will be places of indiscretion, and the religious will be denigrated.
In the generation when the Messiah comes, young men will insult the old, and old men will stand before the young [to give them honor]; daughters will rise up against their mothers, and daughters-in-law against their mothers-in-law. The people shall be dog-faced, and a son will not be abashed in his father’s presence. It has been taught, R. Nehemiah said: In the generation of the Messiah’s coming impudence will increase, esteem be perverted. [Sanhedrin 97a]
The Wisdom of the learned will degenerate; fearers of sin will be despised; and the truth will be lacking. Youths will put old men to shame. [Sotah 49b]
Judaism will suffer greatly because of these upheavals. There is a tradition that the Jews will split up into various groups, each laying claim to the truth, as the Talmud says, “Our truth shall be divided into flocks” (Sanhedrin 97a). This will make it exceedingly difficult, almost impossible, to discern true Ju daism from the false. This is the meaning of the prophecy, “Truth will fail” (Isaiah 59:15).
Maimonides, in his Epistle to Yemen even predicted that many will leave the fold of Judaism completely, without mali ciously intending to do harm to the Jewish people, and the nation shall suffer immensely as a result of their actions. This is how our sages interpret the prophecy, “The wicked shall do wickedly, and not understand” (Daniel 12:10)..
Of course, there will he some Jews who remain true to their traditions. They will realize that they are witnessing the death throes of a degenerate old order and will not be drawn into it. But they will suffer all the more for this, and be dubbed fools for not conforming to the liberal ways of the premessianic age. This is the meaning of the prophecy (Isaiah 59:15), “He who departs from evil will be considered a fool” (Sanhedrin 97a).”
http://www.moshiach.com/topics/what/the-moshiach-in-our-time.php
I believe the Messiah already made his first appearance about 2000 years ago but perhaps you are refering to his return…
(Couldn’t resist a little tweek on Messianic theme.)
It’s a good try, but inaccurate. Neither did the purported messiah meet the qualifications. To understand why, you have to read Jewish sources, something Christians generally don’t do except to compare and contrast, and prove to themselves what they already ‘know’ to be true. The bar was set very high, and Jesus did not reach it.
Actually I have done so, and Jesus meets all of them, with perfect precision.
Did you not notice that the person you were “tweeking” is named Menachem Ben Yakov? That’s a Jewish name. The Jews do not consider Jesus to have been the Messiah that they are waiting for. I would not have thought that there was anyone so ignorant as to be unaware of these facts, but apparently I was wrong.
Oh, and it’s actually spelled “tweak”.
tdiinva, I respect your right to believe what you want and worship as you see fit. In no sense was my post a ” recruitment ” . I was simply expressing a Jewish thought. You can take it or leave it as you like. Your attempt to overlay your own doctrine on my own is nothing new. You would do well to recognize that were my beliefs based on falsehood your faith wouldn’t have a leg to stand on.
Mr. Larry and Mr. Pat:
Like all seriously religious Jews, Menachem is well equipped to defend his religious views without your hypersensitivity and contrived outrage getting in the way.
What? I thought Obama was supposed to be the Messiah.
/sarc
Some estimates put the Holodomor at 12+ Million! But that may include murders of families to force collectivization.
Relative to the public’s gullibility for lies from the egocentric media: Union drone teachers have dumbed down Americans so long even elders are dysfunctional citizens. The hoi polloi are movie-TV-texting trained mouth breathing robots. What do you expect?
I agree. The better comparison, for many reasons, would be to Leni Riefenstahl.
Leni Riefenstahl made awesome films about the ’36 Olympics and a couple of huge Nazi rallies. By her choice of shots and editing, you can say that she put forward a point-of-view about the events, which actually happened. Oliver Stone makes routine films which tell humongous lies. Seems like a pretty big difference to me. Also, Stone is forthrightly motivated by a seething hatred of America and Americans. However evil she might have been, at least Riefenstahl did not hate the country of her birth.
Riefenstahl also used concentration camp prisoners in her films when the script called for darker people. Will Stone do similar outrages?
As to the comparison between Stone and Gibson, I don’t think it works. Gibson is a very talented actor and director who is going through some terrible personal times. He may not recover but Stone will never reach the same level of accomplishment. Gibson is a tragedy; Stone is farce.
Well put, Dave. I keep thinking back to Journolist — the pathetic, small, post-modern version of Duranty. I don’t know what part of that sordid spectacle is the worst: the ignorance, the mendacity . . . or the enthusiasm (WaPo’s staff sex ed programs certainly didn’t stick, nor did their sensitivity trainings — hmm). Reading what they say about Palin’s body is like watching an entire generation of warped judgment collapse, a generation I’m thoroughly ashamed to have been a part of. Someone else here mentioned the Times wanting Duranty’s writings to be true, and I think the same is true of Journolist. It’s nauseating to contemplate the ill will these privileged media people wished upon Palin, her baby, her daughter, and other entire classes of people outside their zip codes. At least Duranty knew he was lying.
Postmodernism dominates the cultural milieu of the elites. The odds are that Oliver Stone has never read the writing of Jacques Derrida nor Antonio Gramsci. He may not even immediately recognize their names! The doctrines have simply filtered down to a much larger audience from the universities. Stone is existentially indifferent toward facts and evidence. He feels philosophically justified in adhering to the so-called bigger truth. Walter Duranty was merely an outright liar. I am unaware of any evidence indicating that the disgraced New York Times journalists was ever a committed ideological leftist.
I often disagree with John Maynard Keynes. Still, there a few exceptions. This is one of them:
“The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.”
Postmodernism, and more specifically, poststructuralism, has found fertile ground among narcissists of all stripes. What began (among French linguists, of all things) as the valid discovery that all truth assertions are made within, and cannot be made entirely independently of, “contexts,” historical, economic, cultural, political, etc., was truned by French intellectuals, but more extensively by American academics into little more than a restatement of classic relativism (“There are not truths.”) The “decontructionist” gets to gleefully romp through the assertions of others, “deconstructing” them by pointing out “contexts,” and then claiming to have destryed their legitimacy. Of course, the whole time the deconstructionsit gets to make his own assertions that are themselves impliedly exempt from the rules he applies to others. Deconstructionists will never admit this funmdamental flaw in their philosophy, because it instantly destroys it it.
Academics like Stanley Fish held for a long time that there are no truths, only “power claims,” and that rather than seek truth, one must simply make the most effective power claims. This is the intellectual swamp that has ruled most of our universities for about 3 decades, filtering down, as David Thompson says, into the culture at large. And, yes, Oliver Stone is Exhibit A of the intellectual and moral rot that has been the result. I agree it is vital we understand the difference between an opportunistic liar like Duranty and a postmodern poststructuralist product like Stone.
P.T. Barnum meets…
Barry H. Obama? FOR PRESIDENT?
We’ve got an incredibly retarded American populace who bought the ‘freaky-deaky sideshow’ ticket.
Liars/Scary-Clowns/Master-manipulators/Bullshitters-Extraordinare/Politicians/Car-Salesmen/Mattress-Salesmen/Hookers/USDA/Big-Pharma/Creepy-Uncle-Joe/Thieves/Druggies/Coffee-Enemas…
All pretty much the same (imho).
Add to the list: Publishers.
The publishing industry is one of the biggest lies currently running. Big-name authors aren’t writing their own books, and every time the truth tries to creep out, it’s capped. The publishers have the news media (Left & Right) by the nards.
So true.
Also the ‘MSM’ which is dying by the millisecond (which is why our beloved ‘government’ WE ‘pay’ for wants to put the kibosh on the ‘internet’ which is fast becoming the biggest ‘truth-teller’ news source of ALL).
America has been steadily infiltrated and bully-mongered by the Left. It’s time we BULLY back.
“Our civilization is threatened today by those unable to distinguish between truth and falsehood.”
Yes, and much of that is due to the machinations of the Gramscian, Machiavellian Left, as Jean-Francois Revel has so eloquently stated.
There’ll be a butcher’s bill to pay for this…
“And goodnight Mrs. Comintern…wherever you are!”
~Walter Duranty~
Duranty really reminds me of an earlier template for what Eason Jordan admitted that CNN was doing in Saddam’s Iraq; trading regime whitewashing for media access, although I think that in CNN’s case conforming to the kneejerk liberal anti-Bushist media narrative also had a good deal to do with it (conforming to a prevalent Stalinist apologia media narrative almost certainly influenced Duranty as well).
At least Eason Jordan eventually fessed up (kinda sorta), if far too late to matter to the tortured and murdered. I don’t recall Duranty ever doing the same.
It’s the media’s knee-jerk anti-American, anti-America, template. Whatever the conflict, you’ll find the media supporting Americans’ enemies.
Oliver Stone seems to be going through that peculiar metamorphosis that all lefties do when they reach a certain age. No longer able to shock because unfortunately many of their once cutting edge revolutionary ideas have become incorporated into the mainstream courtesy of the Gramscian Marxist cultural revolution, they have to go one further. So they live, in the closed universe of their mental condition, to continue to be “relevant” by delving deeper and deeper into the mental aberrations that got them noticed in the first place. Noam Chomsky comes to mind. Not content to have made their “mark” in the universe of left wing intellectual pathology, they labor harder and harder to come up with something “new” that they think will guarantee their place in the pantheon of intellectual giants. It is all too predictable and painful to observe. There is nothing more pitiable than an aging, graying, dessicated left wing alter kocker still looking for attention. Stone, like so many others, has become the pornographic version of his former self.
Oliver Stone seems to be going through that peculiar metamorphosis that all lefties do when they reach a certain age.
I am taking a perverse delight in decrepit old celebrity leftists making appalling asses of themselves, revealing their true selves and the degeneracy and intellectual laziness that rules their tired old minds. The View is replete with them, with the exception (so far) of Barbara Walters and Elizabeth whatsername. It’s like a Picture of Dorian Gray scenario unfolding exponentially. Whoopie, Sally Fields, Woody Allen, Tim Robbins, etc.
Let them all shoot their depraved mouths off, defending everyone from murderous dictators to child rapists. The more the general public is exposed to their revolting mindset against the backdrop of the most corrupt and radical American government in living memory and the escalating arrogance of the elites, the perpetration of massive frauds (“crises”), the more likely that the people will support a great cleansing of the American soul.
Right on! Give clowns like Stone an open microphone and then stand back. Let people see for themselves the lunacy and virulent anti-Americanism of the loony left in general and the entertainment industry in particular.
What people like Stone don’t want to admit when they sneer at the mere 6 million Jews killed as against tens of millions of Russians is that Hitler set up factories; he industrialised the killing of people of a certain religion, made the trains run on time and set up a cost effective “out of the box cars into the slaughterhouse” production line.
Why they even experimented with making soap from the human fat and lamp shades from their skin.
In general, I usually ignore people like Oliver Stone. But the only thing that concerns me is that his program on Showtime may, to many Americans, be seen as accurate and true. Remember, we live in a culture where, if it’s on television, it simply MUST be true. And that’s the problem. I can only imagine what Stone’s views are on such topics as the Mexican-American War, the Spanish-American War, let alone World Wars I and II, Korea, and his all-time favorite, Vietnam. I’ll just ignore the two Gulf Wars because I already know where he stands on that, and don’t be too surprised if he sees 9/11 as “our fault” and the invasion of Afghanistan as imperialism. Blah, blah, blah, and so goes the song of the liberal left.
I’m also pretty sure that we will be accused of genocide with the American Indians, you will hear that Stalin was a “strong” leader, and that Mao was a “brilliant” leader who was the only person who really could “save” China from itself. And, of course, Che Guevara and Castro were “liberators,” not mass murderers, and Pol Pot was certainly “misunderstood” too. Please, it makes me sick just thinking about it.
Roger, I’m with you. I think I’ll be watching The Real Housewives of New Jersey. That’s a hell of a lot more accurate than anything Oliver Stone could make.
I am actually kind of interested to see how Stone blames America for Stalin or “puts him in context.” It is hard to see how the facts can be twisted that far and remain credible.
Oliver Stone presents unoriginal ideas, his series simply plagiarizes the Soviet Unions historically revised version of WWII.
“Oliver Stone presents unoriginal ideas, his series simply plagiarizes the Soviet Unions historically revised version of WWII.”
Plagiarizes? Presenting a view that acknowledges the role the Red Army had in defeating Nazi Germany is hardly plagiarizing.
Acknowledging the Soviet role in Germany’s defeat is hardly revisionist history.
Tell me, do you have to build these strawmen in order to find someone to talk to?
Nobody has ever denied that the Red Army played a major roll in the defeat of Nazi Germany. The complaints have been over Stone’s attempts to over emphasis that roll.
“Tell me, do you have to build these strawmen in order to find someone to talk to?”-MarkTheGreat
No, actually this place is like an echo chamber, so it needs some sound proofing. Don’t you agree it’s boring to agree with every one?
No one denies the Red Army played a major role in WW2, but they sure as hell don’t want Oliver Stone to mention it.
You’re free to leave the “echo chamber” any time.
In fact, you are actively encouraged to do so.
“Role in Germany’s Defeat…”
Funny, I remember the Soviet Union entering WWII as Germany’s ALLY, dismembering Poland between them
and the Red Army marching tens of thousands of Polish POWs into Katyn Wood and murdering them.
Sorry, pal, the Great Patriotic War as a falling out amongst equally murderous thieves — two bad both sides couldn’t lose.
furious,
-Your absolutly right that it was a falling out.
“Sorry, pal, the Great Patriotic War as a falling out amongst equally murderous thieves — two bad both sides couldn’t lose.”
However, one of those murderous thieves became our ally. Without the Red Army, would it have been possible for The U.S. and Britain to invade Sicily, Italy, and France? For that matter….since there would have been no Stalingrad, would we even been able to push the Afrika Korps out of North Africa?
“Duranty, btw, ended his life in penury, unable to get any kind of literary work. He even tried Hollywood, failing miserably.”
Recall the admission in the NYT by Eason Jordan that the CNN Iraqi bureau repeatedly ignored Saddam’s ongoing atrocities. Here’s to the same fate for the whole lot of them.
I don’t understand why you are wasting anymore words on this schmuck. It only serves his purpose. An in depth review of the life and times of Howdy Doody would be more worthwhile. Maybe Oliver will join Mel in Australia and cohabit with kangaroos. Who cares? He’s an intellectual failure maxing out his high school equivalency diploma.
Not that anyone with any sense would disagree about Stone but your contempt for anyone with merely a high school education is a bit stinky, as well.
I, myself am an highschool graduate, and proud of it.
When we stop ‘wasting’ words, the ‘Left’ wins by default because of our silence to call a CLOWN out.
The LEFT never minces words or stops to THINK before they cherry-pick a target.
The gloves should come off for any AMERICAN who actually LOVES this country and FEARs the SCUM who are trying to infiltrate the MIDDLE-RIGHT MAJORITY.
Wake up, GF. We have GOT TO FIGHT FIRE WITH NUKES this time.
“Platoon” was this loser’s high point, which is to say that shlock allegory has been the moral index for leftard sanctimony and elitism for years. There’s nowhere to go from there except down.
As for the movie, I was there, at that time, on those operations with the 25th. Any mildly bright frosh could have written that screenplay and hired a Sheen cinema whore to agonzie on screen. It’s crap.
That should be “agonize”.
Propping up leftist dictators by bashing America and its allies is (and has been) a sport of kings of Hollywood for decades.
Martin Sheen, Danny Glover, Sean Penn, Michael Moore and Oliver Stone have all been rather consistent in their tilting toward windbags. In the left, lefter, leftist world of tinsel, they are brave and erudite …as long as they are bashing America and Israel for the “communist home team”. What fools the eye, is that the “reside” here, take in all the benefits of free market society…so it appears that they are not playing a permanent “away game”.
They, as well as virtually all hardcore leftists, are really Timeshare Americans. They are not fully invested in being an American, certainly not interested in advancing, promoting, devoting their hearts to, or defending this land of ours. They merely have a “property interest” here. Money, frankly.
If they truthfully spoke about the brutish excesses in the lands where their true hearts reside, (Cuba, the old Soviet empire, Venezuela, the old North Viet Nam…etc.), they could have witnessed it’s sympathetic beating up close, after the offended dictator had it removed and placed on their noses.
America and Israel are the favorite whipping boys of the fringe radical chic left. Unfortunately, Britain has a very open ear for America bashing, and a sordid history of wallowing in slander against Israel. When the Penn/Moore/Stone contingent get in front of a receptive audience to their surly with a fringe on top attitude, they can let loose, thinking they are in a safe harbor.
When the morning after, to find their words are being served for breakfast, their PR lackeys and minions have to go into “protect the castle” mode. You see, a bloated leftist fringe lunatic ego…is a terrible thing to waste.
They retreat to their mansions to lick their wounds and to take calls from the JournoKlan, (Hollywood contingent) assuring them that protection is on the way. “We will bury the stories! We will pick out a critic or two and call them racist! Or warmongering! Or homophobic! Or stupid and not nuanced! Well, which prize is up next, Emmy, Oscar or Nobel, we will award you that!”
Rampant, unchecked leftism is a disease on America’s soul. It operates much like the primordial slime in Ghostbusters. It feeds off negative energy. It seeks out ways to bash America (and Israel, for some reason)…and those who self identify as leftists…try to find positions that allow them each day to slime en masse.
(Much like perverts and pedophiles seek out positions that allow them access to the victims of their perversion)
So, Hollywood, “news” mass media, and academia…fertile ground for their mental perversions.
Timeshare Americans don’t give a damn about anything other than taking out of the ATM, they are in permanent withdrawal at the cash machine. They don’t want to put anything back in…except insults, slander and vile caricatures.
Sadly, they now make up close to 20 percent of the voting electorate. And 80 percent of the current administration’s closest advisors.
They can’t be “proud” of this country, they see the rest of us as bitter clingers, and really don’t have anything nice to say about us, America in general or Israel at all.
The NYTimes never retracted the Walter Duranty liefest…because they wanted it to be true. Still do. They are the paper of record…for Timeshare Americans.
not ‘towing’
I am tired of hearing about the suffering of the Soviet Union during WWII whether in the Stone context or standard liberal/left camp.
Stalin is entirely responsible for the disaster that befell the Soviet Union during the war. His purge of the Red Army demoralized the nation’s armed forces; his alliance with Hitler may the latter success in the West possible and his faithful adherence to the non-aggression treaty provided Nazi Germany with resources necessary to carry out the invasion.
Once must also look skeptically at Soviet war dead claims. The Soviet Union bundles all the casualties suffered from 1939-41 period under the banner of losses in the “Great Patriotic War.” These include the causalities in the war of aggression against Finland; the liquidations from the incorporation of Eastern Poland and the Baltic states into the USSR and attributing the mass graves from the 1937-38 purge to SS death squads. Let us also not forget the use of GULAG inmates in punishment battalions that suffered almost 100% KIA and the use of the NKVD to gun down retreating troops.
The Soviet Union only suffered a PR disaster for the first couple years of the war. They recouped their image later as Stalin left the generals to run the war very successfully. (Stalin did destroy the reputation or imprisoned or killed all of his generals later. Dictator’s can’t stand living heroes, only dead martyrs need apply.)
The people however suffered horribly by the German onslaught and also by their own government. Most civilians were on starvation rations so the soldiers could be well fed. Oh and also so the leaders, functionaries and flunkies could be well fed, as all dictatorships require.
People like Stone confuse the dictatorships they idolize with the people who suffer from them. I am sure he would not enjoy his little junkets if he had to spend them with the actual proletariat of these countries.
I think it was little bit more then a PR disaster.
“Stalin is entirely responsible for the disaster that befell the Soviet Union during the war. His purge of the Red Army demoralized the nation’s armed forces; his alliance with Hitler (made) the latter success in the West possible and his faithful adherence to the non-aggression treaty provided Nazi Germany with resources necessary to carry out the invasion.”
-You are absolutely correct! But it doesn’t take away the fact that the Red Army’s role in winning WW2 was crucial. After Stalingrad, Soviet pressure on the Russian Front allowed for the invasion of Sicily in 1943 and the D-Day invasion of 1944.
GULAG inmates in punishment battalions were a brutal method, no doubt, but Stalin wasn’t prone to sentimentality, was he? The sheer numbers of the Red Army, including those in prison battalions was more than the Wehrmacht could handle. Point being, it made OUR difficult job just a bit easier, which is a poor choice of words, but it’s meant to be taken in a relative sense. This is Stone’s point about WW2 history. American history of WW2 tends to minimize the Soviet Union’s role in WW2.
Any perceived significance that Oliver Stone may have has been granted to him over the years by impressionable people who paid attention to him in the first place.
Any sound emanating from him is only noticed because others in similar careers repeat it and enhance it. Stone Sounds are never audible on their own merit and never have been.
“His reasons for *towing* the Stalinist line were access and the greater glory of Walter Duranty.”
Tut,tut, Roger. Or perhaps toe,toe.
Stone’s last film (Chavez) was a financial dud. Maybe he thinks he has to make news to get his future projects funded.
I would bet my house, most of it anyway, that Stone heard from the folks at Showtime (either directly or, more likely, via his agent) post haste after his Protocols of Zionish statements about Jews controlling the world appeared in the London Times, hitting the global Internet almost immediately; hence the speedy retraction.
A likely explanation for Stone’s abrupt turnabout.
Which makes him a wuss, as well as a liar.
Amazing the damage that self-aggrandizing “one offs” can do.
Duranty, btw, ended his life in penury, unable to get any kind of literary work. He even tried Hollywood, failing miserably.
These types all fail to realize the deep justice operating beyond their egos. I can only hope that Stone’s current new best friend, Oogoe, has a similar fate.
Stalin, leader of International Socialism, killed about five million people in the Ukraine when he sent in the army to confiscate crops and seeds, deliberately creating a ‘famine’.
I wonder if it was this example and Duranty’s loving publicity of Stalin that inspired the National Socialists to believe they could to it too, that they could kill millions of people and no one would care.
It wasn’t what Stalin did in the Ukraine that convinced Hitler tnad the NAZIs that they could kill jews without fear of reproach. It was the systemic genocide of the Armenians, by the Ottoman Turks in WWI that did it.
“Who today remembers the Armenians?” Hitler in ’38 or ’39 to a small gathering of his closest party friends…
It’s got to be hell to hit 60 and realize your life was a waste. I wish Mr Stone a long and introspective old age.
I take a bit of umbrage with your remark.
ONLY because…
I think ’60′ is not OLD any longer if you take good care of yourself, empower yourself with knowledge and get off your aging tuckus enough to stay in ‘shape’.
There are people who look AMAZING at ANY age.
It’s only a number.
Azzhole on the other hand is not an ‘age’ requirement.
Jusssssssst sayin’!
How is Oliver Stone still making films? His recent films have not been profitable as mainstream America has rejected him. His adulation of Adolph Hitler & Joseph Stalin is not helping matters.
Because the Leftie Hollyweirdos will continue to churn out propaganda garbage even if it ‘tanks’ if it suits their ‘agenda’.
It’s a mad, mad, mad worldddddddd.
Right, and then again, this idiot is more 666 years old than anything else…
“Saint Michael Archangel defend us…”
OOOOOOPS !!!
That should have gone to answer your answer to #20…
I am getting old…
Chicken or egg? Are devils made or born? Can people be ‘saved’ from their own beliefs/lies/indoctrination. I think they CAN if they are NOT evil of heart (and just innocently STUPID).
I do notice that people who are good-hearted seem to ‘age’ better than people who are not. Oliver Stone has aged horrible. Roger L. Simon looks great! Co-inky-dink?
Leni Riefenstahl, I think. Oliver’s heading for Leniland. My dream is to see Oliver Stone treated like Elia Kazan at the presentation of Kazan’s Lifetime Achievement Award.
Oops, forgot to take my meds today.
I didn’t read the article, but I just want to say… Boy, PajamasMedia’s articles for the last couple of weeks have been mostly uninteresting for me. Who the frig cares about Oliver Stone?
Duranty? I am thinking more of our very own Goebbels
As you Folks know because of my recent comment about the same subject in another column, I do think that this parallel is correct, because it introduces the subject of the dark shadows moving behind the official scene.
The nihilist subversives believe they can adore the shadow without consequences, but sooner or later they begin sliding down a vicious steep slope and they find themselves acting as mere tools of an evil much deeper than their silly egos.
We must stop thinking to the world in secularist terms, and we will understand much better what happens around us.
Let us pray, for us all.
Is this Stone fellow someone important? Ok, I did like “The Doors” but then I’m a dedicated Doors fan.
Oliver Stone is doing nothing more than parroting an old Marxist line. It is the line that Hitler can to power thru “Capitalist” industrialists, including those in America. And the line is true in as much as that industrialists in Germany did assist with money, and those in America with programs etc… Rockefeller funded the eugenics of the Kaiser Institute. The problem comes from the Marxist line that these people were not of the left. It is this way particularly that the non communist left, the Progressives, became conservatives. It is this that is the Marxist line that Stone is Parroting. The sins of the non communist left, progressives and fellow travelers, become the sins of conservatives. It is how the racism of progressivism becomes the sin of conservatives, and it is the same way how very wealthy, very connected Progressives like Rockefeller became the evil corporate conservatives, when in reality Rockefeller was a near by the book progressive, including having John Dewey educate his own children and funding the University of Chicago and its teaching school. Stone’s line is nothing more than the civil war that occurred between the non marxist/communist left and the progressive left. In Germany and in Italy the Progressive left won, in Russia the communist.
The only way to understand and really get it is to realize there are two groups, mainly, that inhibit the left. The non marxist/communist left represented by the Progressives and Marxists. Deep fighting between the two took place over many, many years, including running street battles in Europe. Battles in this country took place as well, the literature of the 20s and 30s are replete with it. What makes it difficult today is that the leftists of today are a hybrid of the two, the New Left they dubbed themselves in the sixties.
Our job is to dismantle the lies and to point them out loud and clear.
I am beginning to think that the Walter Duranty’s are very, very, common. Most of them just aren’t in positions where they can win a Pulitzer Prize, although they have their dreams, or perhaps delusions might be a better word.
Roger L. Simon’s video clip on this page contains one factual error. The journalist Gareth Jones, who Simon describes as Scottish, was in fact Welsh. As anyone Welsh – or Scottish – will tell you, Welsh and Scottish are NOT the same
There is an extensive website created by two of Jones’ relatives that is full of fascinating articles by Jones as well as background information on him. You can find the home page for this excellent site at http://www.colley.co.uk/garethjones/index.htm. Jones was the polar opposite of Duranty in his reporting. Jones spoke fluent Russian and made a point of going to the site of the stories in person, rather that just recapping what he was told by Soviet “reporters”. (The scare quotes seem appropriate given the absolute nonsense that the Soviets reported in their own media.)
During the Ukrainian famine, Jones took the train as close to the famine zone as he could get until the authorities wouldn’t let him go any further. At that point, he disembarked and walked the rest of the way. He visited with townspeople and villagers and, as a fluent Russian speaker, was able to communicate with them easily. (The Ukrainian language is quite close to Russian.) I was fascinated to find, from Jones’ articles, who the SECOND most loathed man in the famine area was: George Bernard Shaw! (Stalin, of course, was the most loathed man.) The starving peasants were disgusted with Shaw’s pronouncements that Soviet Communism was working when they could see quite clearly that it wasn’t.
Jones’ reports, of course, contradicted the narrative that Stalin was building a worker’s paradise so Duranty and his fellow travellers went to town to deny the truth that Jones had found. One Duranty remark that Jones found particularly nauseating was “There is no actual starvation or death from starvation, but there is widespread mortality from disease due to malnutrition”.
Anyone who has a bit of spare time and an interest in real conditions in the Soviet Union under Stalin will find the website I cited fascinating.
Gareth Jones’ niece, who created the website I indentified above, also participated in the unsuccessful effort to posthumously rescind Duranty’s Pulitzer Prize. People who are too busy to explore the site in detail will find this page, http://www.colley.co.uk/garethjones/overview/duranty.htm, which is her letter to the Pulitzer committee, a very good brief summary of the nature of Duranty’s lies and how Duranty and his fellow travellers consciously tried to denounce Jones’ stories and assure the outside world that no famine was taking place.
Actually, he WAS Scottish. His original surname was MacJones.
Anyone who identifies Jones as being a Scottish surname needs to learn something.
Dear Mr. Simon, Before reading this article, if someone ever mentioned Duranty and Russia all I ever thought about was this-
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=okJJwJEGxh8
- ” ignorance is bliss.”
Keep up the great work, even though it rouses me my from slumber. MBY
My understanding is that millions of Ukrainians were murdered in the Holodomor; and that Duranty was awarded the Pulitzer for covering up Stalin’s mass murders up until near or around that time but not during that time, because it happened after the period for which he received the Pulitzer. Duranty was awarded the Pulitzer in 1932 for stories written in 1931, while the Holodomor was 1932-1933. You can imagine the lame defenses of Duranty’s Pulitzer that would be based on that. Duranty also proceeded to cover up the Holodomor and denied that there was actual starvation, and his Pulitzer only solidified his standing to do it. That’s one bloody Pulitzer.
Duranty privately admitted that millions were dying. If Duranty had publicly told the truth about Stalin earlier, before the Holodomor, then, sure, Stalin would have expelled him from the Soviet Union or whatever, but it might have made the Ukrainian famine geopolitically riskier for Stalin to engineer, and certainly Duranty would not have ended up helping Stalin to cover up the Holodomor. Bloody Walter. Duranty, from his NYT perch, promoted and encouraged a widespread delusion that Stalin and his regime weren’t mass-murderous, and thus helped enable Stalin in his mass-murderous ways.
Yikes, I wrote “Duranty was awarded the Pulitzer for covering up Stalin’s mass murders up until near or around that time,” as if they had explicitly honored him for the coverup, when instead I meant to write “Duranty was awarded the Pulitzer for reporting which covered up Stalin’s mass murders up until near or around that time.” Sorry, I’m usually more careful.
With respect, Roger, several criticisms:
1.Twinning Oliver Stone with the NYT is mixing currants with watermelons. An Oliver Stone film once every ten years is nothing to the power of the Times.
2.Sins of commission by the NYT are nothing to its sins of omission. It isn’t what the NYT deems “News Fit To Print” that most offends and distorts truth. It is what ithe NYT deems “Not News and Unfit to Print” that blinds and misleads the public. Whether it is the Holocaust or ACORN or the New Black Panthers, if it isn’t in the pages of the NYT, it doesn’t exist.
3.Calling the NYT on journalistic merits is a waste of time. The NYT has too much gravitas. It is the newspaper of record. Concentrate instead on the times as a business. Ignore journalistic ethics and focus on business ethics.
Consider the following:
a) Hiring Policies–Until fairly recently, antisemitic discrimination long kept Jewish sounding bylines out of the Times. Today, nepotism at the top and affirmative action in the ranks—equally hypocritical and as fundamentally dishonest–prevails at the NYT.
b) Cutthroat competition and monopolistic practices– The times has global reach but its business affairs are local. Locally, the NYT brutally suppresses all competition. New York has the Daily News and the New York Post but they are not competitors with the Times. Nor is the Wall Street Journal a direct competitor. The Sun, now defunct, was the last direct competitor squashed by the Times.
At the height of the competition, respected and influential people in the art world were openly and enthusiastically lauding the art section in The Sun over that in the Times. The news was clearer and more balanced and outstanding journalists politically barred from the Times like Mark Steyn and Charles Krauthammer appeared on the editorial page.
So the Grey lady took her white gloves off. The NYT, currently two dollars a copy, was cheerfully given away at subway stops and major intersections up and down New York City for free. “Free Times” hollered the hawkers. “Get your free New York Times.”
Did the NYT kill The Sun? I dunno. But the Sun was forced to drop its price to twenty-five cents and The Sun had to be a lot more dependent on the cover price than the fat, ad packed NYT.
c) Predatory sales practices–
Indoctrination is the principal business of the NYT and for me and millions like me indoctrination by the Times began early.
From fourth to eighth grade I was required to read the NYT student supplement. My teachers received annotated copies including suggested student quizzes and student assignments from material in the student supplement. A guided tour of the New York Times Building was a must class trip for every schoolchild in New York.
The influence of the NYT was so complete and suffocating, that I can’t pin down exactly when I began to read the New York Times. The filthy rag was always there. Essays on its boring and predictable editorials robbed me of many hours of doing something healthier like playing ball or reading a book.
Driving a stake through the Grey Lady’s heart is a worthy, even holy endeavor. Stone and Duranty won’t do the trick.
“Like a pretentious, pseudo-leftist Energizer Bunny” is a phrase written by a wonderful writer. No one could compose a more vivid or accurate or funny description of the pathetic, misguided missile that is OS. But the true villain is, indeed, CBS, for filling the airwaves with this particularly odious garbage. William Paley would not have approved.
I don’t think Mel Gibson’s real problem is anti-Semitism and racism. Nobody could build a career in Hollywood today if he were – well, at least the latter. I believe Gibson’s problem is an emotional one, and the crap he spewed is more indicative of pain and frustration than illustrative of deeply held beliefs.
Stone, on the other hand, said what he did in the cold light of day, in full possession of his faculties. It wasn’t a slip or a “misstatement” or “careless use of words” or whatever the current weasel word term of art is. Any adverse consequences he suffers will be “proof” of his thesis – those darned Jews did it.
Reminds me of his angry denunciation of Christians, blaming them for the poor showing Alexander made – on the grounds that by ignoring it instead of loudly protesting, they effectively buried the film. Nope, nothing bad that happens has anything to do with him. Darned Jews. And Christians. They’re all in it together.
1) ” Nobody could build a career in Hollywood today if he were – well, at least the latter. I believe Gibson’s problem is an emotional one, and the crap he spewed is more indicative of pain and frustration than illustrative of deeply held beliefs.”
Steve, while no Laurence Olivier, let alone a Cary Grant, Mel Gibson is an actor, and he could very well build a career working with the very people he detests by…as John Lithgow and Jon Lovitz so memorably said one night on Saturday Night Live…acting!
2) Mel’s “problem” as you call it could easily be both racism and anti-Semitism on the one hand and “emotional” on the other. They’re not mutually exclusive. Racists and anti-Semites can also have many, many psychiatric disorders in addition to holding their charming beliefs.
3) As for your assertion that what Stone said was spoken “in the cold light of day, in full possession of his faculties,” let me assure you that just because he made his deplorable comments in the “cold light of day” is no reason to believe he was in “full possession of his faculties.” I don’t know anyone who’s worked with him or known him during the last two decades who has seen him in anything other than a condition in which he lacked any control of his faculties. Whatever “faculties” he might have once possessed have been long since compromised by what he has done to what was once his mind. He hasn’t been playing with a full deck for decades.
I completely agree with Oliver Stone: left-wing Jews (and other left-wingers) have far too much influence in Hollywood. Moderate or right-wing Jews (such as Roger Simon) and other non-leftists have far too little influence. (Myself, I’m a libertarian Jew.)
Could it be that Stone is not Walter Duranty, but today’s version of that greatest of Hollywood’s enfant terribles, Orson Welles?
Did you see how that vacuous hag, Jeanne Wolf, hung herself out to dry on O’Reilly Factor (wait is that possible or was she already all dried out) defending Oliver Stone, presumably in an effort to suck up to him, at the very same time as Oliver Stone, issues a very insincere apology. Yes, I know it was the O’Reilly rerun and the cow could not have known Stone would try to save what’s left of his filthy reputation, but it was really hilarious..
“Stalin is entirely responsible for the disaster that befell the Soviet Union during the war. His purge of the Red Army demoralized the nation’s armed forces; his alliance with Hitler may the latter success in the West possible and his faithful adherence to the non-aggression treaty provided Nazi Germany with resources necessary to carry out the invasion.”
Germany and Russia had a working relationship well before the Pact. I believe German troops trained in Russia and early on some of their equipment was manufactured in Russia.
The ink was barely dry on the Versailles Treaty when Germany set up offices outside their borders to research and design forbidden weapons systems (specifically submarines, tanks, and aircraft). Of course they sent “advisors” to the nascent USSR to both assist the Soviets and to advance German engineering. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact mostly formalized a longstanding cooperative arrangement in this regard, as well as adding the really nasty parts about carving up Eastern Europe.
And as for Versailles, yes it was a vindictive treaty. But I have no patience with anyone excusing German behavior because of it, since the Germans imposed an even harsher and more punitive treaty on the Soviets at Brest-Litovsk. Shoud we blame the Cold War on Germany?
It’s been a long time since Stone made a movie that made money. In Hollywood, that’s the only real sin.
Roger, your remark “the forced starvation of thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands, of Ukrainian peasants” is an underestimate (a surprising one, given the point of your article).
In Duranty’s article of 23 August 1933 minimising the famine, one can compute from his understated and spun data that he is stating there were ‘at least’ two million deaths. In private conversations he was far more frank (and cynical); he told Eugene Lyons the famine had cost seven million lives, and gave that figure to the Britsh charge d’affairs in Moscow for just the Ukraine, Caucasus and North Volga regions, adding that it could be as much as ten million deaths for the USSR as a whole. (Duranty is quoted in embassy dispatch of 16th September 1933.)
In ‘The Harvest of Sorrow’, Robert Conquest computes 11 million as the total deaths caused by the 1929-1933 starvation and dekulakization together, with a further 3 million people missing from the statistical census projection due to the fact that births almost ceased in the affected areas during the latter part of the period. In a rare example of the Soviet Union letting revealing statistical information slip through the censor’s net, the USSR published education data in 1941 that revealed that in Moldavia (recently annexed by the USSR under the Nazi-Soviet pact), the 7 year old age cohort was one and two thirds as large as the 11 year old cohort, whereas in Kazakhstan, one of the affected areas, it was less than two fifths the size (quoted in Armstrong, ‘Politics of Totalitarianism’).
Even at the time, detailed reporting was widely available (and widely evaded) in the west, and it was unusual to meet denial that the numebers affected reached millions apart from the (very common) Duranty-style denialism. As late as the 1980s (with spectacularly bad timing), some leftist ‘academics’ attempted to revise down the numbers killed in Stalin’s famine and purges, but the collapse of the USSR, discovery of mass graves all over it, etc., etc. blew that away. Indeed, historians such as Conquest began being accused by post-Soviet Russians of understating the numbers: “It is true I always described my estimates as conservative, but I have previously been accustomed to western academics claiming they were implausibly large” (introductory remark by Conquest, quoted from memory).
Today, outside the wilder reaches of politically-correct fantasy, I would have said that the fact of millions having been starved to death, not hundreds of thousands, still less thousands, is far past any possible debate.
Yes, this is true. I underestimated in part because I didn’t want to get into a distracting debate on the size of the Holodomor (not the specific subject of my post). But Conquest’s figures could be accurate. Even if they are exaggerated by a factor of two or three, it is horrific almost beyond comprehension.
The whole -bigger-middle east area from Greece through Yemen, most of northern half of Africa, and most of southern Asia, is an enormous powder keg with kerosine dripping all over it.
Oliver Stone has something to do with it only because one spark can sink the whole ship.
We are facing very serious threat of war with North Korea and Iran. We are already heavily engaged in large scale covert, media, diplomacy, economic and gunboat war with both.
Not to mention our actual shooting wars, one of which is not going so well.
All of it is on the backs of underemployed workers, those that remain somewhat employed after decades of cuts. Few Americans can now afford routine preventive medical care even with full time job and insurance. Slew of articles about that the last few days. Why go for a mammogram and shell out the cash now? Maybe I will get appendicitis, make the deductible and do in in October.
The government is the problem. Someone, a professor of surgery, once looked straight at me and asked “what is the enemy of good?”
I could not answer.
“Better”.
Thank you Dr. T.
I couldn’t agree more, Grace Omalley, when you talk about how Rockefeller is used to associate Hitler with American conservatism. The obvious problem is that Rockefeller wasn’t a conservative at all, but rather the opposite, a progressive. They also trot out Henry Ford for the same purpose. Hitler admired Ford, and in fact had a portrait of him hung his office. Ford also operated an important factory in Germany. But Henry Ford was, like Rockefeller, a dyed-in-the-wool progressive rather than a conservative. Ford paid for an elaborate Peace Ship publicity stunt to further the Progressive cause and also elect Woodrow Wilson, king of the Progressives. By the way, check out Wilson’s own book “The State” where he argues in favor of the superiority of Aryan ways. Jaw-dropping stuff. Ford’s own company took paternalistic control of their employees’ lives in large company compounds, another quite progressive and anti-conservative effort. Ford also was a gung-ho eugenicist, a signal characteristic of progressives. Ford also was an anti-semite who published The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and this must have further endeared him to Hitler’s heart. That’s cause the Nazis were progressives, not conservatives, and this was in fact one of the defences they mounted at Nuremburg. “We got all this from your own progressives, you Americans!”
It’s one of the reasons there ceased to be any progressives after about 1941. They all started calling themselves by another name. “Liberals”, which by the way copted the term. Prior to 1941, when you see the word “liberal”, it means someone beholden to laissez faire ideas. Afterwards, it means someone more enamored of socialism.
Duranty was a reporter, bound to report the truth. He was a liar, full stop.
Stone is an entertainer. His films are entertaining, but in no way are they intended to document reality. And they obviously don’t.
To the extent that he claims they do, he is irresponsible, and a prick, but I don’t think he is in the same category of a**hole as Duranty.
Hello People! Just wanted to tell you that I found tickets to the Jersey Boys concert on May 23rd 2012. In this webpage you can find tickets for other dates too. It’s awesome their performance on stage, this is my second time and I’m still so excited about listening them live! On this page you can see the section where you’re buying the ticket, so it’s very recommended!