Megalomania Chic: World War II According to Oliver Stone
Nearly everyone has heard of “radical chic.” Oliver Stone has done it one better with his latest effort Oliver Stone’s Untold History of the United States, upping the ante to “megalomania chic.”
And not just by putting his name in the title.
Stone has never been shy about playing fast and loose with the facts – or about self-promotion – for what one might call “narrative advantage” (cf. JFK), but in his new Showtime series he purports to be working as a documentarian – giving the straight truth to us poor brainwashed folks, not to mention potential generations of school kids.
But the truth according to Stone ranges from the banal and obvious — the Russian people suffered tremendous losses in World War II (who didn’t know that?) – to the absurd – the world would have been a much better place had Henry Wallace been vice president instead of Truman.
No mention is made that Wallace’s major speechwriter was an agent of the NKVD, nor is there a word about the myriad Venona revelations that the world of Wallace and his allies was riddled with Soviet spies, because what Stone is really trying to concoct here is a form of “Stalin porn.”
Yes, Joseph Stalin — the man who, according to various estimates, killed from ten to fifty million of his fellow human beings — is the hero of at least the first four episodes of this epic and Harry Truman is the villain.
Truman is of course under attack for having dropped the bomb on Japan. Again according to Stone and his collaborator historian Peter Kuznick, that accidental and bigoted American president lied when he said he was taking that momentous step to save the lives of our troops and Japanese citizens. His real intention was to fight a supposedly non-existent Soviet threat.
The truth of whether lives were saved by Hiroshima and Nagasaki will obviously never be known without an alternative universe, but this does not deter Stone and Kuznick in their polemic for a second. Truman bad, Stalin good.
Sure, a few mentions are scattered about blemishing the otherwise pristine record of Uncle Joe (the Katyn massacre) and Wallace has been called by Kuznick “a little naïve about Stalin” (a little?), but the documentary really can be called “Stalin porn.” Every time the Georgian monster appears on the screen we hear swells of heroic music from Beethoven or Shostakovich (himself a victim of Stalin – needless to say not mentioned). And the despot almost always makes a monkey of — or has sage advice for — the bellicose Churchill and the erratic Roosevelt.
So what accounts for this Stalin near-hagiography? Stone has what appears to be an almost psychosexual attraction to dictators — Castro, Chavez, now Stalin. They just have to be of a left-wing sort. Hitler somehow doesn’t make the cut, although he was a national socialist.
I’m too bored with the tedious Stone to take this further, but the Freudian explanation probably has some merit. More obvious is simple megalomania. History is all about me. Me, me, me, me. Pay attention to me.
And how! By making exaggerated, almost silly, claims about World War II and the Cold War, Stone calls attention to himself once again. Who would review or even watch another measured view of that time period? Megalomania pays. The unfortunate losers are the young audiences (and others) who may believe this swill.
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More from historian Ron Radosh on Oliver Stone and the election: It’s the Culture, Stupid: Facing the Long Road Ahead. Radosh writes here in even more detail of the history. He also informed me that it is no longer controversial Stone and Kuznick are incorrect regarding Truman and the bomb. It did save thousands of lives and the main work summarizing the evidence is Wilson Miscamble’s The Most Controversial Decision. I have not read it.
Oliver Stone is a hypocrite and commie pervert. The problem though is that all that Hollywood trash continue to brainwash the younger generation with the help of commies holding most of the positions in American colleges.
Yes, that intellectual giant Matthew Damon keeps reading Howard Zinn’s hysterically inaccurate histories of our Republic on-air, though probably only to captive audiences, i.e., audiences similar to Prof Furr’s hapless students at Montclair St. I recall reading in a woman named Ginzberg’s horrific account [Into The Whirlwind] of her decades at Vorkuta for a “thoughtcrime” when the strange Henry Wallace visited in early 1944. The camp had been being gussied up for months and when Wallace came through, he thought it “a very model” of a detention facility. Of course, the clueless dunce Wallace had zero idea on how many miners had been machine-gunned for trying to escape the “model facility.”
Sadly, the most recent election last Tuesday presents the possibility that teaching kids to be socially monolithic rather than how to learn reading, writing and arithmetic is going to continue another four years. And another generation of dunces will provide ample audiences for celebritards like Damon, Stone, and other Hollyweirdos.
wish he had been in the Soviet Union under Stalin
in a mine in Siberia
i would have called it a growing experience for Mr Stone
Here’s a college professor who denies that Stalin killed millions
A professor at a public university recently denied Soviet Union Leader Joseph Stalin was responsible for the murder of millions, saying he has “yet to find one crime – one crime that Stalin committed.”
“I know they say he killed 20, 30, 40 million people,” continued Grover Furr, a professor in Medieval English at Montclair State University.
“It’s bulls**t.”
Professor Grover Furr of Montclair State University said he has yet to find “one crime that Stalin committed.”
Furr made the comments at a campus debate featuring three individuals supposedly representing conservative, liberal, and libertarian political views.
Following the debate, a student pressed Furr on his comments reminding the professor that most historians believe “100 to 150 million people [were] killed by communist regimes.”
The professor, however, doubled down on his original comment.
“What you said is bulls**t,” said Furr. “It’s wrong. It’s a lie.”
“The history of the Soviet Union is the most falsified,” he added.
In a just world, this man would be shunned and ridiculed to the same degree that someone who denied that Hitler was responsible for the deaths of millions. The sad truth is we don’t live in a just world.
Just to be pedantic, it’s quite possible neither Hitler nor Stalin killed anyone with their own hands. However, they were each responsible for millions of murders.
Anyone who doubts Stalin was a mass murderer of extraordinary proportions, should start with the works of Robert Conquest, then move on to Solzhenitsyn. After that, they can look up the Holodomor. When it comes to mass murder, however, number one with a bullet is Chairman Mao.
For a more fun look at Stalin worship, check out the Austrailian movie “Children of the Revolution,” starring Judy Davis as a life-long fan who who realizes her dream of meeting the great man and promptly kills him in the sack.
You forget to mention that the fictional character played by Judy Davis is impregnated by Stalin in his last act and bears an illegitimate son back in her native Australia who grows up to become a two-fisted labor leader who then gradually goes paranoid and has his best friend snuffed and ends in prison. You can tell as his office decor gets darker and more sinister-looking.
None of Stalin’s boozing however, and no family that he abused and drove to drink or suicide.
I don’t think an intellectual giant like Prof. Furr would be convinced. He sounds like a classic conspiracy theorist. Stalin killed millions? Nonsense – that’s just what THEY want you to think!
Remember who you’re dealing with. These are the same sort of people who refused to recognize the obvious until they were finally being herded into the showers…
Then, according to Sobibor survivor Tomas “Toivi” Blatt, they sang such beautiful renditions of Shema Yisrael before the door was slammed.
Blech.
I have to highly recommend JungChang’s Mao. Alhthough she makes no pretense tobe fair (should one be fair to Hitler?) she has information no once else does, and she was there.
Basically, Mao – her count of deaths is 70 million – wasn’t even really a Communist. He was just a magalomaniac, wanted to rule the world. Easily the most evil man of all time.
She also gives American pressure on Change Kai-Shek (Eisenhower) part blame for Mao’s takeover. Something to rememeber here in Israel.
Exactly Roger and all can be easily documented but you can walk onto almost any collage campus with a Mao, Stalin, Marx, Che image on your “T” shirt and you will raise nothing but with a Hitler on your shirt you are called a Right Wing Nut. Hitler was the 3rd ranked mass killer of the 20th Century, 3rd in the ranks of Socialists death dealers and those of us on the so called “Right” only get aligned with the 3rd rated. If they really hate us so much why are we not called right wing Mao’s? Because they claim the “Best” for themselves, they just clean up the image and doctor the history a bunch.
More proof that “more educated” does not equal “smarter” and a reason that professors of medieval English should not be counted on for their understanding of Soviet history. I’m willing to guess he doesn’t read Russian or have any understanding of the organization of the Soviet state either.
Meh. I have no doubt his denial is more of a way to whitewash the truth — he admires the slaughter, and wishes to replicate it.
Professor Grover Furr of Montclair State University said he has yet to find “one crime that Stalin committed.”
Somewhere beyond the long-disused boiler room in hell’s third sub-basement, Stalin grimaces and mutters in shame that the last apologist he can muster is a New Jersey English teacher. Lenin and Mao still rate historians, and even Idi Amin still has postage stamps with his visage, but all he’s worth is some guy whose day job is trying to pump up enthusiasm for Beowulf among college sophomores in America. Lo, how the mighty have fallen!
The comparison with Hitler will have occurred to just about anyone who has read the effusions of Mr Grover Furr (ps is this a hoax? Is there really a college professor named Grover Furr who denies Stalin was a mass-murderer?), but the point is none the worse for that. And here’s the really inexplicable thing: Grover might as well be coated in teflon for all the criticism he is likely to receive from his colleagues in academe. The old, weird syndrome: left repectable, no matter how obviously barbarous or extreme. Anything to the right of centre, irredeemably evil.
Grover’s unhistorical garbage is no different from what people like David Irving, Frederick Toben and their holocaust-denying cronies spout. They are rightly ridiculed, reviled and despised for it (nb: criticism must be muted if you are Ahmadinejad, a leading Egyptian mufti or a member of the Hamas leadership). They are rightly beyond the pale of any civilized discourse, the more so since their views are fundamentally the product of top-down reasoning; they are all rabid antisemites.
Yet will Grover Furr suffer the same fate? To pose the question is to know the answer.
“The old, weird syndrome: left repectable, no matter how obviously barbarous or extreme. Anything to the right of centre, irredeemably evil.”
The phrase is, I believe, “no enemies to the left”.
Thus you will never hear a leftist denounce a Marxist or Maoist or Che worshipper, but even the least concession to liberty makes you indistinguishable, to them, from a Nazi.
Who were, after all, declared to be “right deviationists” by Stalin.
“Thus you will never hear a leftist denounce a Marxist or Maoist or Che worshipper, but even the least concession to liberty makes you indistinguishable, to them, from a Nazi.”
That might be true in some circles today but it certainly wasn’t true during Stalin’s lifetime. Stalin and his minions loathed Trotsky and his followers and went out of their way to kill them whenever possible. George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia describes his experiences in the Spanish Civil War when he fought for the Left and saw Trotskyites routinely rounded up and killed by Stalinists. And of course Trotsky himself was murdered in 1940 by an assasin sent by Stalin.
Mao also turned on factions of his own Communist Party both during his rise to the top of the party and after the Communists had control of China.
They were rivals for power, and none of the rhetoric they used against each other was about being too strident in their communism. They’d denounce each other as counter-revolutionaries, right-deviationists, wreckers, hoarders, whatever. They never would say that maybe, just maybe, one of them was taking this “dictatorship of the proletariat” thing too far.
Eric Hobsbawm, don’t forget him. He has recently joined Stalin.
Apparently not a hoax, he’s for real (if that’s the right phrase.)
http://msuweb.montclair.edu/~furrg/
What’s ghastly is that he teaches Mediaeval English Literature. That was C S Lewis’s job.
You know, this should be extremely disturbing for me. However, after having to deal with: a World History High School teacher who at least once took a dump on Catholicism by at the very least implying that they deliberately caused the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, and also talking badly about French clergy while discussing the French Revolution; a professor for World History up to the 1500s who was basically a femnazi and frequently talked bad about Christianity and even had the audacity to imply that prior to the 1960s, only “Rich White Males” (emphasis on males) could even get an education, much less write history; an American Literature Professor who not only blatantly states that he’s a liberal, but also mentioned off-handedly during a midterm review the session before the midterm that he wanted to join the Occupy crowd, and would have if it weren’t for his being a teacher during the day of that review, not to mention stated that the guy who discovered the cell (either him or Thomas Aquinus) stated that “Nature is a whore which must be raped”, or at least attributed it to either of the two;, a Film Professor who can be best described as an overgrown anti-Vietnam radical, who frequently claims America had no business in Vietnam and even claims that the Domino Theory was false, and even when someone in his class (like me) tries to inform him that the Domino Theory was in fact true and cited the fact that Vietnam, after the “reunification”, took over Cambodia, Laos, and was about to take over Indonesia had it not been for the Soviets cutting their funding, only for me to be blown off by him by claiming that we invaded them first and implying we did it for Tin and other metals, and he also gave me a pretty low grade (it was still pretty high, just a point below an “A”, but still very low) for reasons I suspect are because I wrote about I want your money in a way that supported Reagan, despite my following all the instructions for the paper; and, recently, a Chaucer Professor who spends most of his time when we aren’t reading the material basically stating that Christian Europe was extremely misogynistic towards women, to the extent that he even claimed that they committed honor killings or comparable things, and that he supported the 1970s Feminist Movement (you know, the one where the slogan was “Women need Men like Fish need Bicycles.”), and apparently one of his favorite books was something called “I Married a Communist,” I can’t say I’m even remotely surprised. There really needs to be a way to clean the entire education up. If we can’t clean it up, the only other thing to do is get rid of it completely without a restart.
Oh, I also forgot to mention that my professor in my Anthropology course implied that the study of Anthropology was actually somewhat Marxist.
If there was a “like” button I would click it.
One small comfort. CS Lewis was a giant. Grover is the most diminutive and forgettable of pygmies (I am trying to be very un-PC in saying that, although comparing Grover to them is very unfair to pygmies).
Grover is not alone. There is a Stalin Society whose aim is to “defend Stalin and his work on the basis of fact and to refute capitalist, revisionist, opportunist and Trotskyist propaganda directed against him”: http://www.stalinsociety.org.uk
I sometimes wonder if professors in colleges ,purposely tell the students falsehoods, to see if any students have the critical thinking skills to check out the lies. If I were teaching, that is what I would do. I would throw in a few absolute bull sh it stories, and tell the students that there are some absolute lies in what I am teaching, and if they don’t find them before the final exam, they fail! That would weed out the poseurs!
Doubt it. My American Lit professor and my Chaucer Professor make their liberal views very clear (the former even stating that, had it not been for the fact that he has to go to work at college, he intends to join up with the Occupy group for a protest, and the latter frequently claims that Chaucer-era Britain and Europe, not to mention Christians during that time, were misogynistic, that misogyny was actually STARTED by none other than Saint Augustine, and heck, that his favorite book was about someone’s husband being a Communist.). That’s also not getting into my World History up to the 1500s professor often claiming that women were looked down upon, and even had the audacity to imply that women couldn’t even get an education until the 1960s, frequently bashed Christianity, among other things, and my film professor was such an overgrown 1960s’ radical that he would have made even Bill Ayers blush, frequently making liberal talking points, and even when people such as me try to point out some things that contradict his views (such as, for example, his claim that the domino theory was proven to be false during his showing of Hearts and Minds (yes, THAT “Hearts and Minds” that anti-american POT of a documentary that was comparable to Michael Moore’s films), and I pointed out that it actually did come true, citing the North Vietnamese, after conquering the South Vietnamese, took over Cambodia, Laos, some other country, and even attempted to conquer Indonesia until the Soviets cut their funding for the group), they rebuke me, like the aforementioned film professor cutting me off by stating that America conquered those countries as well, and implied that they did it for the tin resources. Heck, when showing us Battleship Ptolken, my film professor even said something along the lines of recruiting us for the Communist party.
re: “If I were teaching, that is what I would do. I would throw in a few absolute bull sh it stories, and tell the students that there are some absolute lies in what I am teaching, and if they don’t find them before the final exam, they fail! ”
You might do that your first semester teaching. Would your department head praise you or would you get a pink slip?
In the Brave New World of US higher ed, many universities and community colleges require students to “evaluate” their professors. These evaluations are used to “grade” the professor, determine tenure eligibility, raises, etc. If you are a “tough” professor, is it likely spoiled students accustomed to straight As for their subjective skills in things like “cooperative learning” or whatever is the value-du-jour of university education professors – will praise you for making them work hard? Will the slackers like the low grade they deserve and receive?
Is it any surprise that many US professors give out superior grades for little or no effort?
That is probably true. Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a school ,where your kids could get a real education?
I can’t understand why Stone and so many others in Hollywood go out of their way to bite the hand that feeds them. Having survived Europe, my father was on the way to Japan when the war ended. Without the atomic bomb a ground war with the Soviets attacking from the north would have killed more Japanese than the two atomic bombs as well as thousands of Russians and Americans. Would I be here but for the atomic bomb and how many of us today would not be? As for me, my destiny with Stone will, it appears, soon take place. It seems that he is going to do his final anti American film when Pinkville will finally go into production after years of waiting. Having spent my time in Vietnam only a short distance from Mai Lai on the Batangan Peninsula, I can attest to what happened there. It was wrong and horrible, but I understand why it happened, and the only difference between being actively involved in the atrocities could be determined by the length of your service and your pent up rage for fighting an unseen enemy. Unless you were there, you can not judge, and unless you can replay history, you can not condemn Truman for his actions.
My father was also slated to head to Japan. The Japanese had a standing order to execute all Allied POWs the moment an invading force stepped foot on the mainland, and the number of POWs they held exceed the numbers killed at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. By that measure the atomic bombs saved allied lives even before the battles to invade Japan took place.
My father (6th Infantry Division) expected to be sent to Japan, although the divison was still heavily engaged on Luzon when the war ended. He quoted the “million casualties on the beach” figure, which may not have been accurate, but he believed it, and I imagine, didn’t expect to survive the invasion.
The number of Allied casualties would have been swamped by the number of Japanese casualties. The continued existence of Japan as a nation, culture, and people is thanks to the nuclear bomb.
WW II veteran and retired Professor Paul Fussell passed away in May at the age of 88.
In 1945, Prof. Fussell and millions of other weary soldiers waited orders to proceed with the invasion of mainland Japan. Troops who’d survived the shellings and brutality of the Pacific island assaults believed they would die or in turn slay tens or hundreds of thousands when faced with ferocity of a people resisting “Satan” on their shores. Who could be a human being after that?
Prof Fussell recounts the reaction of the beat-up US marines and soldiers when the announcement was made about the dropping of the first, then second atomic bombs.
You may wish to read his article – it’s on the internet under the search: Paul Fussell Thank God for the Atomic Bomb. Dr. Fussell originally published this story in the 1980s at, LOL, The New Republic.
If we had NOT dropped the bomb, we would have been called racists, and they would have been right.
I recall reading the account of a Hiroshima survivor, only a mile from ground zero. The teenage girls were practicing, getting ready to attack the soldiers with sharpened sticks. Imagine if our soldiers had to mow them down?
It is quite possible that more people would have been killed in Hiroshima alone had we not dropped it.
The reason is pretty simple. When normal people look at Stalin and the rest they feel revulsion. When the likes of Stone looks at Stalin or Che or Mao, they get jealous of that kind of power and especially the adulation they received. That fact that said adulation was based on terror (except amongst the most deluded) matters not: it’s the attention, power and wealth that counts.
That’s why so many liberals seek power and why it always turns out the same. It is all about them and maximizing their power regardless of what happens to everyone else. They are all severe mental cases, a devil’s brew of narcissism, sociopathy, rage and hate. It would do humanity a great service to instead of putting them in office to study them in detail from interviews to brain scans and DNA breakdowns in order to design tests to weed their kind OUT of public office and the corporate world.
Stone is a narcissist. cf. http://www.halcyon.com/jmashmun/npd/traits.html
Authoritarian: In other words, they are suck-ups. They want to be authority figures and, short of that, they want to be associated with authority figures.
Narcissists feel entitled to whatever they can take. They expect privileges and indulgences, and they also feel entitled to exploit other people without any trace of reciprocation.
Narcissists are generally contemptuous of others. This seems to spring, at base, from their general lack of empathy, and it comes out as (at best) a dismissive attitude towards other people’s feelings, wishes, needs, concerns, standards, property, work, etc.
Grandiose: They live in an artificial self invented from fantasies of absolute or perfect power, genius, beauty, etc. Normal people’s fantasies of themselves, their wishful thinking, take the form of stories — these stories often come from movies or TV, or from things they’ve read or that were read to them as children. They involve a plot, heroic activity or great accomplishments or adventure: normal people see themselves in action, however preposterous or even impossible that action may be — they see themselves doing things that earn them honor, glory, love, riches, fame, and they see these fantasy selves as personal potentials, however tenuous, something they’d do if they didn’t have to go to school or go to work, if they had the time and the money.
As Freud said of narcissists, these people act like they’re in love with themselves. And they are in love with an ideal image of themselves — or they want you to be in love with their pretend self, it’s hard to tell just what’s going on. Like anyone in love, their attention and energy are drawn to the beloved and away from everyday practicalities. Narcissists’ fantasies are static — they’ve fallen in love with an image in a mirror or, more accurately, in a pool of water, so that movement causes the image to dissolve into ripples; to see the adored reflection they must remain perfectly still. Narcissists’ fantasies are tableaux or scenes, stage sets; narcissists are hung up on a particular picture that they think reflects their true selves (as opposed to the real self — warts and all). Narcissists don’t see themselves doing anything except being adored, and they don’t see anyone else doing anything except adoring them.
“I can’t understand why Stone and so many others in Hollywood go out of their way to bite the hand that feeds them.”
Because they know that hand will never slap them, and they despise it for its “weakness”.
My father was also aboard a ship heading to Japan. He was 18, in the Army and a cook, but he was still on a ship heading to Japan. So….the bomb saved my dad and allowed me and my brother to be.
My husband, a B-17 pilot, was shot down and spent months in a German prison camp. When he was returned to the U.S he was in training to go to the Pacific. Thank God for the atomic bomb.By the way, he had the Distinguished Flying Cross. He did not do what he did for the likes of Stone or Furr. I wish they knew that, but they cannot feel shame. Shame makes one human.
Just to add to the list, my father would have been on a destroyer, AA screen, for the invasion. Most frequent targets of the Kamikaze. He was one of the original 90 day wonders and would have been on the bridge or in the engine room. I was born 15 months after the surrender.
My father was also in Europe waiting to go to Japan. He had already lost a first cousin who had been killed at Leyte. Thank heavens that Truman did drop the bomb. The estimate at the time was that a million soldiers would have lost their lives in the invasion of Japan.
Kuznick is one of any number of revisionists who have tried to rewrite history. Fortunately, real historians have just shaken their heads and explained why their theories are baseless.
As to what is and was being taught in colleges, apparently some professors take and took their liberal thinking too far. During the 60′s,I went to one of the most liberal universities in the U.S. It was the birthplace of the SDS. However, I can’t say that any of my professors were particularly radical. They certainly never tried to force their beliefs on me if they were. I even had a professor who taught a course on Marx and Communism under Lenin as well as Stalin. He didn’t sugar coat anything. Basically, he said that Communism as it developed in Russia was not what Marx envisioned. Further, he said that because of the nature of man, neither would work. Also, he was fully aware that Stalin was a murderer. Unfortunately, many liberals never had a sensible professor like mine. By the way I am very close in age to Clinton and his wife so I am well aware of what was going on at that time.
As a side note, during the 60′s the newspapers and magazines had a lot of coverage of the riots on the U of C Berkeley campus. One would think that the campus was being torn apart by the demonstrations there. My uncle, however, knew a professor who was teaching there at the time. That professor told my uncle that some of those demostrations were staged by the magazines and newspapers. I can believe it because I saw a small one with less than 200 people on my campus. That night on the news the reporter talked about it as if if was a huge event when, in fact, it amounted to nothing.
I think your Professor, while somewhat on the mark, was probably wrong as to whether Marx himself envisioned what Communism would be. I thought it was quite clear from Marx’s line of “Religion is the Opiate of the Masses” that he would have wanted religion destroyed.
I do agree with everything else, though. And honestly, considering the fact that the media has stooped as low as to alter a 911 call from Zimmerman, not to mention Walter Cronkite’s recent exposure to being both heavily biased and completely unethical, not to mention Dan Rather’s attempts at influencing the election by claiming that there were negative documents from Bush that apparently never even existed that resulted in his firing, I wouldn’t be surprised if the media actually did manipulate the people into rioting during that time. In fact, in either one of the Politically Incorrect Guides or A Patriots’ guide to American History, that’s also what they said. Sigh… sometimes I think our “Freedom of the Press” was a very big mistake, since its clear that their freedom is doing damage to America, and to Christian Values. I doubt that there is any real objectivity in the media, so I guess we should remove the media in its entirety.
Ed – you delete my comment and leave Walt’s commie pervert line. Really?
[Sorry, Ron, no one editing you. Just otherwise engaged.]
I was wondering when Showtime was going to sneak this into their lineup.
I’ve seen an opinion bandied around lately with which I wholeheartedly agree. Klavin (and Simon) may have been among those who’ve recently implied: that as conservatives, we simply must make more inroads into the visual arts — specifically film, video, TV. If we do not produce competing (quasi-) documentaries to compete against the likes of Oliver Stone, et al., we’re in for more of the same (with all the long-lasting downsides of shaping early minds).
Given the appallingly low rate of reading in this country, there are many people who (effectively) confuse a dramatization with the underlying event. Despite being supposedly more cynical as viewers now than in the past, a low male voice speaking over moving images still invokes a great deal of authority and veritas.
We must produce our own propaganda (which is the correct word both for what Stone creates and for what we should create). Of course I’d call it “truthful propaganda” — but the title is ultimately irrelevant. We cannot compete against the amount, the quality, and the ever-encroaching nature of leftist film / video propaganda with op-eds alone (not meant as criticism of this piece!).
A hackneyed but apt phrase: we must fight fire with fire.
Absolutely.
Maybe we should try to get some young aspiring film makers to work on such a project. It would beat working at Starbucks and it might open some eyes.
Don’t underestimate the ability of people to wave off reality. People see what they want to see. Liberals are the greatest mitigators of reality in American history. It is the bedrock of what they do. Nothing interferes with their narrative. They simply wave things away and invoke the same “cause and effect” cheap psychology at the heart of Affirmative Action. Liberals routinely decontextualize history to the point it is unrecognizable.
Case in point, slavery. America was built on slavery, blah, blah, blah. No Northwest Ordinance in this story, no anti-Jim Crow laws in Minnesota pre-dating 1900. You won’t hear about that – it didn’t happen. Libs have even done a good job of putting the Civil War on the back burner.
In 2003 Duluth, MN dedicated a statue to 3 black men lynched there in 1920. According to the Tuskegee Institute, there were 9 men lynched in MN, 1882-1968 – 4 were black, 5 white. There’s your bizarro lib view of history. Whites were never lynched by vigilantes for rape, but for completely different reasons. Blacks were always lynched for being just being black.
Libs look at results in their peculiar way. As long as black folks don’t do well in America, whites will be racist, which might be a long haul. If they applied the same thinking to sports (which they do NOT do) there’d be endless mudslinging, blame and excuses from second division teams. Liberals are nuts. They see what they want to see.
Muslims could detonate an atomic bomb in Chicago and I’ll still be an Islamophobe til the frickin’ horns of Gabriel blow and the sun coughs and dies.
I started college in the heyday of the “Soviets won the war, the US just provided backup” revisionism. I was home one weekend, and proceeded to tell my Dad (a WWII vet) about how all the stories about American military might were exaggerated and how the Soviets got short shrift here in the US.
My dad just said, “You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.” It was like a gun going off in my head. I suddenly realized that I was this smart-assed kid trying to tell a man who lived through the war, how it really was 35 years later. I felt embarrassed about that conversation till the day my dad died.
But there was an upshot. I never took what my “learned” professors said at face value any more. My third epiphany occured – not everything you hear in college is the truth either.
The Soviets did the lion’s share in destroying the German army, and would have won the war even without the landing of American troops in Normandy. This point is not disputable, though I don’t know whether it gives one the right to say that the Soviets “won the war.” (Personally, I should be inclined to say no.) Where there is room for disagreement is in just how important were American moral support and lend-lease aid to the Soviet effort during the decisive years 1941 and 1942.
The Soviets did in fact do the lion’s share, but for three years they were the only one’s fighting the Germans on the continent, other than the Americans bogged down in Italy. Also keep in mind the Americans were fighting the Japanese single-handedly.
An early crucial point in the Soviet-German War was when the Soviets felt comfortable enough about not worrying about the Japanese in the Winter of ’41-’42 they brought reinforcements to the Battle of Moscow.
Had there not been Allied forces bombing Germany, threatening and finally invading Western Europe, I don’t think the Soviets would have won. I think it would’ve been a stalemate. The Germans would’ve had more air assets not destroyed by us, and been able to send more divisions to the East, and they would not have been written down by fighting in N. Africa, Sicily, and Italy.
I guess, then, one should ask, “which war?”. Japan attacked the US, not Germany. The USSR had a non-agression pact with Japan.
I’m tempted to agree that the Soviets would have eventually won the war, as Stalin seemed willing to commit to the meat grinder as many soldiers as it would take. However, without Americans troops I think the British would have abandoned any attempt to strike back into western Europe and would have settled into a more-or-less permanent containment policy. Germany would have only had to deal with one serious front. The panzer divisions left to guard against the expected invasion from across the channel would have been free to confront the Russians coming from the east.
Without American bombers, the Britsh would probably not have attempted strikes deep into Germany and stayed with the night bombing routine they were employing. The daylight bombing raids by the Americans, while costly, were more precise and effective than the nighttime raids at hurting German production and supply.
I doubt that the British would have even attempted the Italian campaign without American support, let alone a cross-channel invasion. Germany would hardly even needed to more than garrison western Europe because the threat of invasion would be virtually nil without the Americans. With the extra men and materiel, I’m not so sure that the Germans couldn’t have held off the Soviets in the east. So by that rationale, the Americans were as instrumental as the Russians in defeating the Germans. And no insult to the British, who held the line for two years while Russia and America dawdled. So in a sense they were equally instrumental in the victory. I think that there is a great probability that Germany could have won the war, if any of the big three allied nations had not been actively engaged.
The revisionism I referred to was that since the Soviets took the brunt of casualties and ultimately took Berlin, they therefore won the war for the allies. I’m just suggesting that their contribution was neither more or less important than that of the Brits or Americans. While the Soviet contribution was downplayed during the cold war, the intellectual elite wished to take the entire laurel wreath from the Americans and hand it over to the Russians. And I think for purely political reasons.
Tom T – You make most of the points that I was going to make. It is summed up in the idea that “the British provided the time, the Soviets provided the men, and the Americans provided the materiel”.
A couple more points. The Americans provided huge amounts of materiel to the Soviet Army. It is said that the Soviet Army reached Berlin on American trucks. The British and American bombing of Germany forced the Germans to keep a significant fraction of the Luftwaffe home for protection. When the bombing eventually became effective, it disabled the German railway system and crippled the oil infrastructure. The Wehrmacht essentially became a horse-driven army as it had been in WWI. It is not clear whether the Soviet Army, which as it was needed a 6-to-1 advantage over the Germans to defeat them in an engagement could have prevailed without this direct and indirect assistance. 97% of Russian men who were 18 to 22 years old at the outset of the war did not survive. It wasn’t much better for men slightly older. They may not have succeeded if the Germans could have focused entirely on them.
Didn’t the plot of Orwell’s book 1984 center around Winston’s job of re-writing the past. Do Stone et al fit into this scheme?
What is the impact of this type of America-bashing film? Focus groups anyone? Invite youths to see the film and then ask questions. After I saw this film my belief about America was basically a) better b) worse, or c) no change.
If the overwhelming answer is worse, we have a huge problem: it means Hollywood, for whatever reasons, is making it easy for our children to scorn their inheritance, the country itself. Would they defend the country if needful? Why get hurt defending a piece of shit? I also wonder how this affects US youth growing up in homes where their parents through lack of knowledge (born elsewhere) or otherwise, imbued them with “anti-colonial”, anti-western or anti-tolerance prejudices.
Another question: How often are films like this “dubbed”, streamed or broadcast to populations elsewhere? Rulers often find it beneficial to steer resentments elsewhere. Look at the 20th century use of mass media to drum up hatred of “others”.
Can well-made but mis-representative pieces of film be used to incite western hatred, spawn plots and schemes to a) blow up airplanes, b) damage our infrastructure, and of course, c) destroy us and our economy? Does Oliver Stone’s imagination allow him to connect the dots between the safety of his family and his “art”?
How ironic: Stone spends $100 million on an anti-American film, and a 25-yr old in a cave with a $500 computer and a generator turns it into hate-inducing propaganda for billions of people. Marx, Stalin, Lenin, Pot Pot must be laughing and cheering in hell.
For several years I have been growing in recognizing the momentous nature of the election of 1948. Schools handily blow it off with the “Dewey Beats Truman” photo-bumpersticker. That the Democratic Party was riven by the clash between Truman and Wallace gets no mention. That Wallace ran on the Progressive Party ticket gets no mention. That the Party of Truman was hijacked by the Party of Wallace is not recognized, temporarily in 1972 and permanently in 2008. Could the Republicans have been able to deny the authenticity of today’s Democratic Party? The Democrats bleat loudly and often about how the Republican Party has been “hijacked” by TeaPartyEvangelicalsKarlRoveNeoConservativesetc. No response from The Stupid Party.
Could not the case have been made that the Party of John Kennedy and the Party of Ted Kennedy are not the same parties? That the JFK who would deal with the Soviets as adversaries would be physically sick with the Ted K. who sought Soviet cooperation with the defeat of the Strategic Defense Initiative?
The re-writing of history has been successful. The KKK is now seen as a Republican Party operation (see Boardwalk Empire’s fusion of the KKK and the GOP). The murder of JFK will forever more be a “right wing conspiracy” despite Jackie Kennedy’s “He didn’t even have the satisfaction of being killed for civil rights. it had to be some silly little Communist.” The American involvement in the Vietnam War, which successfully ended in 1973 with the Paris Peace Accords, must never be recognized. America must have continued its “imperialism” through the evacuation of the Embassy in 1975.
Trail of Tears, Copperheads, Ku Klux Klan, Jim Crow, Woodrow Wilson.
Shove their damn history down their throats.
The re-writing of history has been successful.
Indeed, that effort has been successful, but won’t remain so; more to the point, history will record the leftist extremists’ efforts—temporarily successful—to substitute fake history for the genuine item.
Stone’s “documentaries” are to history as Lysenko’s notions to agronomy or the patently ludicrous “anthropogenic global warming” hoax to science. I predict Stone will be remembered as a nickel–dime purveyor of hackneyed twaddle rather than a noteworthy fraudster. He’ll be lumped with a handful of others of the same ilk and memorialized with a few foot notes.
Small loss.
“Shove their damn history down their throats.”
Tried it. They deny it.
They simply deny that the motives behind the atrocities of “progressives” past were the same motives they have today and declare that the atrocities were committed by “conservatives” who all moved to the Republican party.
Partly they are in denial — but mostly they are simply so stuck on their own righteousness they cannot even consider they may be in the wrong.
Yes – and they are sooooo self rightous that they’d kill off 100 million of us in a heart beat if they could justify it. I’m sure they’re working on that. Justification, that is.
Excellent point. Could John Kennedy be nominated as leader of the democrats today? The only thing qualifying John Kennedy for the democrat party, was his adultery!
I agree, but the part about VietNam War ending in 1973 is false. Read Al Haig’s book on the period; he was the Chief of Staff and middleman with South VietNam. We surrendered, de facto, and betrayed our allies horribly – or rather the Democrats in the media-driven (c.f. Dan Rather reporting from the White House) Watergate scandal forced us to.
At the end, North Viet Nam took over in a conventional attack. The ARVN fought bravely, reusing bandages and rationing granades. We were supposed to support them accoridng to the treaty, but we betrayed them again and even cut off economic aid.
(Reminds me of what happened on the Golan in 1973, where a bunch of yeshiva boys held off the Syrians with tanks that had no shells, thanks partly to the US wanting “to teach Israel a lesson” – another incident distorted in history. The Yom Kippur War was a partial betrayal of Israel by the US.)
Let’s take a look at the dropping of the atomic bombs. My premise is that it was miraculous (secularly used) that we had atomic bombs, it was miraculous that we had two in that you might recall one wasn’t enough and finally it was miraculous that we had a president who would drop them.
Given the experience in the Pacific war up till then I feel safe in saying the invasion would have been long and bitter and the casualties would have probably been greater than we had sustained in the war up till then.
In 1945 there were three million Japanese in occupation of large parts of China, all of Korea, Indonesia, Viet Nam, etc. etc. One half a million of those were civilian administrator or engineers of one kind or another but the rest were military, military units who… had… never… known… a… defeat.
I don’t find it difficult to imagine that at some point in the invasion of the home islands that the emperor or since no one had ever heard the emperor’s voice until he made his surrender announcement someone else sending a message saying he was the emperor to the overseas occupiers to fight on to the death for the glory of Japan.
So after the invasion we would be faced with a decade or more series of campaigns to root out the Japanese in the colonial areas of Indonesia and Viet Nam, Korea, a little country that no one cared about, and China. I have a difficult time believing that Americans would have been enthusiastic about high casualties in these area just to had them back to European interests to site the worst example.
Enter the Soviets. Japan had tried using them to open a peace negotiations with the US for some time. By the way the Japanese idea of peace was that we would stop military operations and they’d get to keep all the goodies they had won up till then. But I digress.
It would seem likely then that these Japanese occupiers should turn to much better relations with the Soviets who were now enemies of their enemy. This would have given Soviets a huge area to work their malicious magic in, out flanking the US position in strategic and profound ways. I tremble at the possible outcomes.
It is being speculated that it was not the Atomic bombs that brought the Japanese down but the entrance of the Soviets into the war against them. But the defeat in Manchuria was far away while at home it appeared that we had a weapon from which you couldn’t hide and that would scour the population off the face of the earth. My vote is for the latter proposition. I welcome substantive disagreement.
“My premise is that it was miraculous (secularly used) that we had atomic bombs, it was miraculous that we had two in that you might recall one wasn’t enough and finally it was miraculous that we had a president who would drop them.”
True, but the bigger miracle was that we beat Hitler to it. The story of the Nazi nuclear program, such as it was, could truly be titled “Humanity’s luckiest break”. They had Heisenberg, after all, and a host of brilliant physicists. But Hitler, thank God for his (Hitler’s) untiring stupidity, had no understanding of nuclear research, dismissed it as “jewish physics”, and starved it of funds.
Just imagine if the nazis had got there first, and had even a modest supply of bombs. Does anyone doubt that the whole world would have had to surrender quietly, as even the fanatical japanese did? Or that having subdued the world, the nazis would have got started on the other “non-aryans” after having solved the “jewish problem”? It’s so chilling and horrifying it doesn’t bear thinking about, and although the allies were comfortably ahead in the nuclear race, it could easily have gone the other way.
Johnny, how right you are. But, and help me out with this because I’m going on memory from quit a while back, didn’t Heisenberg write a book saying that he sabotaged the German effort and didn’t we successfully bomb the heavy water plant in Norway?
I also read once upon a time that the theory of a bomb was well known and that anyone could have produced one (although we later had to help the French–too much wine one might imagine) but in the midst of this conflict only we had the resources. In fact I read that even the Japanese had a research/development program in Korea but it never came near maturity.
I’ve oversimplified a bit, and there were several main reasons why the Nazi nuclear effort never got too far. They included the disbanding of the initial “Uranverien” because its personnel were summarily placed into other areas of the war effort, and the disbanding of the second one in the early 40s because their scientific expertise was thought to be more urgently required in non-nuclear areas. The destruction of the entire stock of heavy water by bombing the ferry that was trying to whisk it away from the beseiged Norsk Hydro plant didn’t help the program either. But overarching all this was the Nazi’s ludicrous ideological dislike of nuclear physics, which they regarded as tainted, along with quantum physics. God knows what Heisenberg, Hahn and others might have achieved if the Nazis had enthusiastically embraced nuclear technology. Thank heavens they didn’t.
As to whether Heisenberg tried to sabotage the project — well . . .
Thank you for a considered response.
I know it’s easy to say after the war that you were a… hero!
The explanation I heard is that it was Heisenberg’s spectacular miscalculation of the amount of plutonium needed to initiate a chain reaction that scuttled the German bomb effort.
That notwithstanding, the more I learn of the sheer, gargantuan scale of the U.S. effort to build the bomb, the enormous resources and talent required, I simply don’t believe the Germans or Japanese could have done it.
Not to mention that so many nuclear physicists fled the area, particularly the Jewish ones.
I don’t think it’s so much the thoery as it was purifying the Uranium (235 into 238?)
– had kept his “word” to invade Manchuria sooner, maybe Truman wouldn’t have had to drop the A-bomb. Instead, he declared war on Japan afterward, knowing he could seize land without loss.
One good thing is that Stone is getting older and will not live forever. It must be hard to be a megalomaniac and know that your influence is waning and that your work will not stand the test of time.
Megalomania (or just plain mania) is the only explanation that makes sense anymore. I’ve read some zany accounts of his erratic personal behavior and if he was still on drugs he’d be dead by now.
http://www.forbes.com/2009/08/27/ted-kennedy-soviet-union-ronald-reagan-opinions-columnists-peter-robinson.html
Kennedy would lend Andropov a hand in dealing with President Reagan. In return, the Soviet leader would lend the Democratic Party a hand in challenging Reagan in the 1984 presidential election.
The story continues….
after watching KEN BURN’S “THE WAR”, i find all other “documentaries” about WWII to be sophomoric!
Thank you very much for this review.
There is no need for a parallel universe to be sure that the nukes saved lives: the only fact that it took two bombs instead of one to have the fanatical Japan surrender should convince every baïonnet-happy, flame-thrower-friendly filmmaker.
And it’s absurd to say that Roosevelt feared an hypothetical USSR threat by bombing Japan. Japan was a threat in its own right: Remember Peral Harbour! Plus, the Communist threat was not hypothetical: hasn’t Stone heard of the Cold War?
As a matter of fact, I really wish the US President had had the guts to tell the Russian: we have the supreme weapon, go democratic and stay calm or we’ll vitrify you. That’s what Churchill had in mind. The world would be a MUCH better place by now.
Pearl Harbor, the Rape of Nanking, the scourging of the Philippines, and every island in the Pacific campaign up to that point.
“it took two bombs instead of one”
Those who think that a “demonstration bomb”, perhaps in Tokyo harbor would have been preferable do not realize that even with the actual destruction of a living city, the Japanese High Command WOULD NOT BELEIVE THEIR OWN EYES.
But a DEMO would have convinced them otherwise?
Sheesh.
Those who think that a “demonstration bomb”, perhaps in Tokyo harbor would have been preferable do not realize that even with the actual destruction of a living city, the Japanese High Command WOULD NOT BELEIVE THEIR OWN EYES.
But a DEMO would have convinced them otherwise?
Yes, I’ve pointed out this absurdity to many people over the years. If Hiroshima wasn’t enough to get the Japanese to surrender, how would’ve a demonstration have done the job?
The Japanese didn’t even surrender immediately after Nagasaki was bombed but instead a few days later. Even then, a near coup by hardliners almost stopped the surrender from happening. According to an interview with Paul Tibbets back in 2002, he was ordered to go back the US and get a third bomb to personally drop on Japan. The surrender made that unnecessary but had the coup succeeded, it would’ve happened. They didn’t have very many more bombs. In fact, I wasn’t even aware that the third operationally ready bomb existed until that Tibbets interview.
Studs Terkel: Why did they drop the second one, the Bockscar [bomb] on Nagasaki?
Paul Tibbets: Unknown to anybody else – I knew it, but nobody else knew – there was a third one. See, the first bomb went off and they didn’t hear anything out of the Japanese for two or three days. The second bomb was dropped and again they were silent for another couple of days. Then I got aphone call from General Curtis LeMay [chief of staff of the strategic air forces in the Pacific]. He said, “You got another one of those damn things?” I said, “Yes sir.” He said, “Where is it?” I said, “Over in Utah.” He said, “Get it out here. You and your crew are going to fly it.” I said, “Yes sir.” I sent word back and the crew loaded it on an airplane and we headed back to bring it right on out to Tinian and when they got it to California debarkation point, the war was over.
UTAH?
BTW…When the discussion comes up whether Country X can/cannot build a bomb, the fact that circa-1940 America was less than five years from demonstration is never pondered. That America did not have the incredible computational power of the Silicon Revolution. That America did not have knowledge certain that it was even possible. Yet, that same America invented it within five years.
And it was done in complete secrecy, in a country where the majority of its economy and brain-power was focused on conventional weapons. And it was the FIRST time.
The 509th Composite Group did their training at Wendover Field, Utah. From Wikipedia:
By late 1943, Manhattan Project scientists were confident enough to direct the Army Air Forces to begin preparations for the atomic bomb’s use against Germany and Japan. The AAF concluded that the Boeing B-29 Superfortress aircraft would be the most suitable delivery vehicle in either theater of operations. In April 1944, Gen. Henry H. Arnold selected Col. Paul Tibbets, to form and train a group to drop the device. Tibbets chose the remote Wendover Army Air Field over Great Bend, Kansas, and Mountain Home, Idaho, as the location for the Silverplate training program. The 509th’s training was classified Top Secret; therefore the desert isolation of Wendover Field was ideal.
I guess that’s where they kept the remaining bomb(s).
Add to that the little fact that several more bombs were being assembled and were planned to be used (along with mass quantities of mustard gas) as tactical weapons on the beachheads…
Never watched anything by Stone, never will.
Show Biz kids making movies ’bout themselves.
You know they don’t give a puck about anybody else.
Ah, the ever-popular “alternative universe”. Like the one where the economy would be in even worse shape had Obama and the Democrats not spent $800B on a stimulus package, with nothing to show for it four years later.
I wonder if Obama has a goatee in that universe?
The greatest catastrophe that could ever befall Oliver Stone is to be ignored. Pray that this series is a colossal flop.
So; If Obama is such a spectacular intellect, why has he never been published on American Thinker?
Appears to me, that actual THINKING is NOT his forte.
Example:
This documentary (The Soviet Story) was shown to a group of students (80 people) in a big American university. When the instructor asked them if they had been introduced to the subject in their high school history classes only 3 (!) said “yes”.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-76SMFLDiy0
Stone has what appears to be an almost psychosexual attraction to dictators — Castro, Chavez, now Stalin.
Well that clears Stalin’s name, if you know anything about the other two characters.
Defectors do sometimes embellish their plight… it’s natural for ex-royals to moan about revolution, claim babies were yanked from incubators and so on.
And often, the atrocities actually happened.
When treason is no longer a crime and being a traitor no longer makes you an outcast, then the slime of Oliver Stone, Sean Penn, Michael Moore and Bill Maher becomes “entertainment” for the morally bankrupt.
We now are surrounded by so many traitors and so much treason, we literally swim in betrayal, lies, deceit, and propaganda. Some buffoons believe that the country must endure destruction by betrayal because of the First Amendment.
This, of course, is inane.
We should not tsk-tsk treason. We should put a foot on its scrawny neck…and break it.
By my lights also, a list of villainous characters. But may I ask you a few questions?
What is your definition of treason?
Why do you think it is the only crime mentioned in the US Constitution?
Upon what rationalization do you think was the First Amendment founded?
Why do you, apparently, not trust the strength of your ideas in a free market place of ideas?
After their “neck are broken” who shall decide the next round of necks to be broken? And what will the process be and who shall decide who shall decide?
Henry VIII could have answered (and did) with a snap of the fingers but what are your answers?
Giving aid and comfort to our enemies — which Stone clearly does. And he does so publicly, and I have no doubt we could find enough witnesses to clear the Constitutional requirements for conviction.
By my lights also, a list of villainous characters. But may I ask you a few questions?
Of course. Any course of action, any defense of nation…should withstand scrutiny and principled dissent.
What is your definition of treason?
A concerted effort to tear down an honorable nation, a principled people, through lies, distortion, propaganda, poisoning the information stream, slandering this nation and its people, Judeo-Christian adherents and tenets, for the purpose of overthrow.
Why do you think it is the only crime mentioned in the US Constitution?
Because it is THAT important to the preservation of that great document. Not only can a nation not stand half slave/half free…it equally cannot stand half patriot/half traitor. We MUST understand, appreciate and comprehend the key differences between being liberal and being traitorous.
A liberal can speak of compassion and empathy. But a traitor has bile behind the soft pastel coloring of those words. When liberals advance the treason of overthrow through sniveling betrayal…they are no more liberal, progressive or compassionate than any other despicable enemy.
The failure to appreciate the difference and to snuff out those who intend to destroy us, the failure to rise to the call to defend the country from the enemy within…is an appalling act of cowardice.
We may twiddle away our freedoms, we may spit upon our honor, we may navel-gaze away our liberties…like so many trembling dullards…who contemplate inane trivialities of semantics. Or we can defend goodness against evil. It’s our choice. And, I …for one…will not idly follow the sniveling toadies who are halting, hesitant and whose honor is cheaply bought by empty rhetoric.
Upon what rationalization do you think was the First Amendment founded?
To give principled dissent the chance to breathe. To give freedom,oxygen. It dares NOT, however, to give enemies within the free reign to corrupt our best intentions only to replace them with lawlessness, despotism, or tyranny. What fool would cling to the notion that a nation must be destroyed by glorifying twisted interpretations of its principles..over the principles themselves? To allow itself to be beaten with its own devotion to open society?
If we lose our ability to see wrong as wrong, to follow righteousness and to clearly light the path for others, then those words are meaningless.
Do you question in good faith, or merely to darken the path of right is right, wrong is wrong, fair is fair? Have you no ability to understand when the line is crossed? If so, you have become a pitiable cretin. No offense, intended. Many have indeed followed that road to perdition. The mere fact that you offer up these questions…raise the question of the purity of their intent.
Do you find yourself straddling the fence between being an enemy within and a defender of our nation…because you slavishly adhere to parsing words and tilting at windmills of semantics?
You are not to be admired in that instance. It is not honorable to sacrifice a nation to faux academic follies or mental gymnastics, bending oneself into a pretzel trying to invent a moral relativism between treason and patriotism.
When we find traitors (Howard Zinn, Chomsky, Ayers, Stone, Penn, Moore, Maher et al)we do ourselves no benefit by “allowing” their treason to not only go unchastised…but allow it to be ADMIRED. Our failure to fight the treason of academia, Hollywood, mass media…and now, much of the Democratic Party…leaves us reeling with crippling debt, morally crushed, lawlessly ruled and threatened with extinction. It is PRECISELY the attitude you display here that has give life to internal terrorization over our daily lives.
YOU…and the attitude you display here…must be changed. I do not state this lightly. Nor come by this position rashly. It is YOU who now stand between giving in to tyranny or making our stand. For if we cannot convince YOU to be a patriot and to understand where the line is drawn, …we will lose this nation and all that it should be.
Absolutely defend principled dissent with your very life. But, with the same rigor…defend honor, oppose treason, and know the difference.
Why do you, apparently, not trust the strength of your ideas in a free market place of ideas?
Please forgive what will clearly feel like harsh words. Your sentence above is one of an imbecile. MY “ideals” cannot compete if they are strangled from academia, throttled by Hollywood and vaporized by mass media lies, distortion and propaganda.
They cannot “compete” in a rigged game. Ask the people who opposed Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Papa Doc, or any tyrant throughout history if their “ideals” were too weak to “compete” with tyranny.
If you are so dim that you cannot understand that ideas only “compete” when EVERY IDEA is free and equal because it is principled at its core…and those who cheat, lie, distort and propagandize…squeezing out those competing ideas through tyranny and despotism…then there is no “competing” at all.
If you cannot understand how deeply we have been invaded in the marketplace of “ideas”, then you are beyond convincing. You are simply a buffoon.
After their “neck are broken” who shall decide the next round of necks to be broken? And what will the process be and who shall decide who shall decide?
A coward’s complaint. When enemies are dispatched who is to raise their flag again? I could not care less. You obviously cannot find it within yourself to defend this nation, only its enemies.
Right is right, wrong is wrong, fair is fair. If we adhere to honor, when we vanquish those who mean to destroy us, we can contemplate how to preserve our freedoms, insure our liberties, …but we can do neither from the gulag or reeducation camp.
Again, empty rhetoric glorifying treason does not move me. Parsing hollow words in defense of treason does not stir my soul. We not only need to know that there is a difference, but where the difference lies….but, we should not fritter away our homeland…navel gazing while the heartland burns.
Henry VIII could have answered (and did) with a snap of the fingers but what are your answers?
Herbert Markuse, “Repressive Tolerance” (1965)
The article became a Bible for the Left, especially for the academia. The interesting thing is that now the Conservatives should read and adopt these ideas, because they find themselves in a situation similar to that of the Left as it is presented by Marcuse.
“In the United States, this tendency goes hand in hand with the monopolistic or oligopolistic concentration of capital in the formation of public opinion, i.e., of the majority. The chance of influencing, in any effective way, this majority is at a price, in dollars, totally out of reach of the radical opposition. Here too, free competition and exchange of ideas have become a farce. The Left has no equal voice, no equal access to the mass media and their public facilities – not because a conspiracy excludes it, but because, in good old capitalist fashion, it does not have the required purchasing power. And the Left does not have the purchasing power because it is the Left. These conditions impose upon the radical minorities a strategy which is in essence a refusal to allow the continuous functioning of allegedly indiscriminate but in fact discriminate tolerance, for example, a strategy of protesting against the alternate matching of a spokesman for the Right (or Center) with one for the Left. Not ‘equal’ but more representation of the Left would be equalization of the prevailing inequality.
Within the solid framework of pre-established inequality and power, tolerance is practiced indeed. Even outrageous opinions are expressed, outrageous incidents are televised; and the critics of established policies are interrupted by the same number of commercials as the conservative advocates. Are these interludes supposed to counteract the sheer weight, magnitude, and continuity of system-publicity, indoctrination which operates playfully through the endless commercials as well as through the entertainment?
Given this situation, I suggested in ‘Repressive Tolerance’ the practice of discriminating tolerance in an inverse direction, as a means of shifting the balance between Right and Left by restraining the liberty of the Right, thus counteracting the pervasive inequality of freedom (unequal opportunity of access to the means of democratic persuasion) and strengthening the oppressed against the oppressed. Tolerance would be restricted with respect to movements of a demonstrably aggressive or destructive character (destructive of the prospects for peace, justice, and freedom for all). Such discrimination would also be applied to movements opposing the extension of social legislation to the poor, weak, disabled. As against the virulent denunciations that such a policy would do away with the sacred liberalistic principle of equality for ‘the other side’, I maintain that there are issues where either there is no ‘other side’ in any more than a formalistic sense, or where ‘the other side’ is demonstrably ‘regressive’ and impedes possible improvement of the human condition. To tolerate propaganda for inhumanity vitiates the goals not only of liberalism but of every progressive political philosophy.”
http://www.marcuse.org/herbert/pubs/60spubs/65repressivetolerance.htm
Brilliant. I had forgotten “Repressive Tolerance” – a landmark of the New Left n
On Youtube I came across a series of talks by famous historians and one was, the ever left, Howard Zinn. I held my breath and started to watch. I don’t think I got to the ten minute mark before I stopped though I was glad for the education I got in that short time.
Mr. Zinn is well educated, has written “acclaimed” books on US history so imagine my surprise to find that he was either a nincompoop or a dissembler and to have it revealed in such a short time.
To paraphrase as well as I can remember: 1930′s, working class parents, working at the docks, not treated well and participated in mob action during which he was hit on the head by a police officer, at which point to asked himself, “Is this America?” Interestingly, everything he mentioned as being wrong, well he always said wrong with America, was in fact plainly wrong, there was no gain saying it.
But here’s an inconvenient truth (where have I heard that before) no fact has any meaning unless it is juxtapositioned with another fact of equal magnitude. In the context of the times he was relating in the Soviet Union, in many parts of the world tens of millions were being starved to death for political reasons or simple liquidated.
Would you allow another example? Rome was imperial and brutal, though no more so than anywhere else in the world. And if you compare the empire to what took place in Europe for several centuries after it’s fall you might come to a more forgiving conclusion.
When you are arguing with the left (and I have some bones to pick with the right also) you don’t throw facts back at their factoids. You ask them questions and to define their terms.
Tell me what is your definition, secularly, of a human being, the basic, basic? What is help? What is the purpose of a human life? Allow me to suggest an answer to this latter, it is being of help to others. But then what is “help”? Help, I think falls into two categories; simple help and help for a personage? You offer your “T” wrench for stubborn lug nuts; simple help. But for a personage, a life, you offer opportunity, opportunity to earn fulfillment. Look around and note how rare is the commodity of opportunity on the planet and whenever someone shines in some dark place it is always because they had opportunity. Opportunity rare and the taking of same when offered is rarer still, but that never the less is the best that can be done.
re: “working at the docks, not treated well and participated in mob action during which he was hit on the head by a police officer”
Compared to what, Mr. Zinn?
Suppose Mr. Zinn had been a Lithuanian small farmer(Kulak) in the 1930s. Suppose Stalin’s police came to his farm, shot the farm animals, destroyed the seeds, and removed food supplies. Patiently Stalin’s police waited for the farmers to starve, them came back, razed their houses, telephoned Stalin’s agriculturalists who established collective farms, and imported a more compliant population.
Let’s see, Mr. Zinn. At one of the darkest times in recent world history, you joined a group of American protestors and got hit up side head. Had your grandparents stayed in eastern Europe, you might have been starved or worked to death by Marxist totalitarians. How is your historical telling of US history remotely reliable if you don’t tell the reader what peoples outside America endured?
Your students were falsely taught that if they rejected America, as they are doing, they will have heaven. But what will post-America deliver? Heaven or hell?
As a descendant of the victims of the Evil Empire of Rome (as the Rabbis called it), I would rather strongly contest that statement. Read what Rome did to the civilians of Jerusalem (many of them Jews who came for the Passover and just got stuck) simply for the crime of holding out on them for so long.
In the Obama world your opportunity is defined by the state, by a person in power, by a bureaucrat, and by the ideology of that bureaucrat.
This is exactly what they had in the Soviet Union at its late stage (post-Stalin decades): millions of people wasted their lives simply because the opportunities offered for them were against the very nature of an individual and his free spirit. The rampant alcoholism in the USSR especially in 1970-80s was not just an inherent vice – it was a passive protest and refusal to accept the state created “opportunities”.
Two great posts Walt, thank you.
I really liked “Wall Street” — saw it when it came out. Even “Money Never Sleeps” had a lot going for it. It did capture what happened — but cold fusion? Really?
However, I had no idea how crazy Stone is until I saw an interview w/him talking about Chavez. Wow! What a loon. I couldn’t even believe he believed what he was saying.
I recommend the “Why we fight” series, a war programm piloted by Capra on behalf of the US Army.
And also “Rules of Engagement” by Friedkin, about an US embassy stormed by a mob in an Arab country, and the subsequent court-martial…
Howard Zinn doesn’t get a great deal of respect among professional historians, but he was quite right in pointing out that what passes for American history in our high schools is garbage. The ideological slant varies from year to year, but history has always been a political football kicked around by people who only look to the past for ammunition in current battles. If you read old textbooks, as I have, you’ll see that for most of our national existence, history has been little more than hurray for our side! Political pressure, mostly from ethnic groups, has moderated the patriotic nonsense at times; but smiley-faced multiculturalism isn’t a huge improvement.
I don’t know if objectivity is a liberal value exactly, but actually facing the facts about what we’ve done and suffered would certainly be a radical move and one which would be extremely uncongenial to folks like you whose entire philosophy of life is based on the denial of reality as witness the various forms of denialism so prevalent among you, e.g. global warming, evolution, etc.
History Is Like The Bible/Torah, The NewTestament/Evangelium, And the Koran/Qur’an. In It You Can Always Find A Point And A Counterpoint To Any Argument You Want To Make Whether To Support It Or Denigrate It. Of Course There Is A Way Out Of This Oxymoronic Logic Most Of Your Commenters Seem To Espouse. But I Can’t Find It In Any Of Their Comments Thus Far. And It Is Definitely Not Worth My Time To Expand Upon This Way Out Just To Educate The Crowd In This Forum.