More Revelations about the Oliver Stone-Peter Kuznick “Documentary” on How America is an Evil Nation
Actually, we do not have to wait for an answer. Kuznick makes it quite clear that he is writing a script that will show how the US consciously moved to the “dark side.” Indeed, he says he agrees with Daniel Ellsberg that during the war in Vietnam, “We were not on the wrong side. We were the wrong side.” This is, I suggest, more than shocking. It shows that if anyone has not learned from history, it is Prof. Kuznick. Can he explain the thousands who fled the Communist rule and risked their lives in the endless flotilla of refugees, the so-called “boat people”? Can he justify the re-education camps, the imposition of totalitarian Communist rule, the suppression of all dissent, and the one-party state that was created after North Vietnam’s victory?
In asserting that the United States was on the wrong side, Kuznick so many years later supports those who during the ’60′s anti-war movement called not for peace negotiations and an end to the bombing, but for victory for the National Liberation Front (or Vietcong), and who held placards proclaiming “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh-NLF’s Gonna Win.” He inadvertently offers support to those of us who said at the time that these people did not want an end to what they thought was a wrong-headed war, but were really agents of the Communists seeking victory for their side. Thank you, Prof. Kuznick, for showing us now that those anti-war people like Irving Howe and Michael Harrington, who refused to march in DC demonstrations with such people, were correct in understanding the real agenda of the movement.
Speak of “Manichean simplicities,”of which Kuznick accuses only the United States! He even accuses the US of threatening the world with “nuclear annihilation in order to force compliance with U.S. demands.” Examples, please? Since his interview was given to HNN as the world now contemplates the attainment by the theocracy of Iran with nuclear weapons which in fact do threaten the world (and which the Obama administration rightfully says it will not allow to happen), what is his position on Iran’s attempt to get a bomb, and its persistent threat to obliterate Israel?
He asks what would “have happened if Henry Wallace had become president in 1945 instead of Harry Truman? Would there have been no atomic bomb and, perhaps, no Cold War?” Let me answer this, Prof. Kuznick. I know something about Wallace, having written my MA on him, having spent a full day with him at his farm in South Salem NY, and having researched his life and having written a very critical review of his life for The New Republic. The answer is easy, and it is not the one I think Kuznick expects.
Not only would there have been a Cold War, but it would have put the United States on the same side as Joseph Stalin, and helped the Soviet dictator gain his goal of not only creating imitations of Moscow in the so-called “Peoples’ Democracies” of Eastern Europe, but enabling him as well to subvert the established Western democracies existing in countries like Italy and France. With Wallace at the helm, the United States would have had a president advised by the remaining secret Communists in the government, such as Wallace’s top advisor, the Soviet agent Harry Magdoff, who subsequently went on to edit the Marxist publication Monthly Review after his years in government came to an end. Having established already that he in fact supports the other side in Vietnam, it is perhaps not surprising that Kuznick also supports the Soviet side in the emerging Cold War in the 1950s.
In Kunzick and Stone’s eyes, the US is always the villain — as he puts it, the country that resorts “to force, and sometimes even assassination, terror and torture to achieve that goal.” What does he, and his documentary, I wonder, say about Saddam Hussein, who forced the citizens of Iraq to live under the force of Hussein’s fascist boot for so long? Somehow, I don’t think he is too concerned about anything like that question.
How sad that like other left-wing and self-hating Jews, Kuznick too uses the fact that most of his family perished in the Holocaust to justify his present obscurantist and reactionary views. He wants us to believe it is his “abhorrence of fascism” that forces him not to remain silent in the face of evil. The problem is that the only evil he sees is that of his own country, while he exonerates or ignores the evil in other nations, or blames their evil on what the United States has done to them — the perennial favorite argument of the far left.
Yes, Kuznick denies this. Realizing what he has said, he then seeks to deny his own argument, claiming that he and Stone do not say that the “United States is somehow intrinsically evil and that other nations are, by contrast, more moral.” Of course, he has in fact said just that a few paragraphs earlier. He goes on to explain it is only that the US has the power and wealth to do great harm, while other nations do not. This too is false. The “revisionist” historians of the Cold War used to argue that the Soviets could not have been at fault for the postwar division of the world, because they emerged economically devastated at the war’s end while the US was strong. But as we have seen from Cold War histories written by scholars like John L. Gaddis of Yale, the Soviet weakness did not stop them from successfully scoring many victories and from manipulating the wealthier Western powers to succumb to their agenda.
In his last paragraphs, Kuznick reveals that he and Stone will conclude by showing viewers how the US through all the postwar presidents used “unchecked power” that might have led to six hundred million dead worldwide had nuclear war broken out. They will then show how would-be “decent leaders” like Kissinger and Reagan (does Kuznick really believe they are decent, or is this just a verbal mechanism to set them up for his kill?) supported “the most vicious, malign, and murderous forces in Latin America.” Really? Will his viewers get a counter argument from people like Elliot Abrams, whom Kuznick easily could have put on camera, to answer and show the policies of Reagan and George H.W. Bush isolated the Leninist guerrillas, led to peace negotiations, and ended both right- and left-wing extremism in the region?
And as for Islamic radicalism today, Kuznick as expected argues that it is the fault of the US, because we alone “deliberately (my emphasis) fostered and fanned the flames of Islamic extremism.” So, as I said earlier, if there is extremism that is bad, it always is OUR fault. They will show, he says, how our leaders “repeatedly lied the country into war.” I assume that goes for resurrection of Charles Beard’s old thesis about FDR too. After all, Old left and Old right come together when it is a matter of conspiracy theory explaining history.
I end with a concrete challenge to Prof. Kuznick. At one point, he says that in his classes, he brings in a “diverse group of speakers” from all sides, such as supporters of the war in Vietnam and its opponents. The list he offers, however, is largely composed of those who have very similar points of view — that of the Left. He only mentions one speaker whom I know to have an independent view, Max Holland, a man I have worked with in the past and who is brilliant and incisive in his critiques.
So I offer him this challenge: When your class deals, as I assume it does, with the McCarthy era and anti-Communism in the United States, bring in both John Earl Haynes and myself to talk on the subject and to challenge the point of view you hold which I assume will be advanced in the film. Both Haynes and I, who are in the metropolitan DC area, have the credentials and expertise to talk to his class and give them a solid contrary view. I’m waiting, Prof. Kuznick, for your response.
“I know something about Wallace, having written my MA on him”
I was unaware that Ron Radosh wrote his Masters thesis on Henry Wallace. It is absolutely horrifying that this childishly naïve man almost became president of the United States. Wallace was far too trusting of the Communists. To describe him as a useful idiot is to be kind. The Communist spies working within the Roosevelt administration like Alger Hiss would have had a field day. Wallace was also a major supporter of the New Deal policies that severely damaged the American economy.
“…and demanded instead an exhibit that “held that the atomic bomb was neither necessary to end the Pacific war nor to save American lives,”
How can anyone say something so ridiculous with a straight face? The Japanese military machine had no interest whatsoever in seeking a peaceful resolution to the war. It was utterly committed to victory—or national suicide. Nihilism underpinned the very foundation of this militarist ideology. There is little doubt but that the dropping of those two atom bombs saved countless lives of both allied soldiers and even Japanese citizens. There is also something else that must be recognized regarding the Japanese fascists: they were racists to the core! The Ku Klux Klan cannot even begin to compete with these monsters. And I am not even slightly exaggerating. White Southern American racists were mild imitators compared to the Japanese racial supremacists.
I have a very serious question I would like to pose to you, Roger Simon, VDH, Bill Whittle, …maybe David Horowitz.
Do you believe the offense of treason is gone from the American landscape in nearly every meaningful way?
It always should be a very, very, very difficult charge to bring, in my opinion. Unpopular beliefs alone should not give rise to such a serious charge. It would cheapen it.
However, it appears that leftists have long since abandoned any pretense of being in the least bit loyal to America and have openly embraced her enemies. Whether its giving away state secrets, creating propaganda victories for Communist dictators or conspiring in a worldwide scam to defraud American taxpayers…who would have to pay others…for normal weather.
And anyone who heroically tries to stand up to them is red kryptonite (being called a McCarthyist), black kryptonite (being called a racist) or green kryptonite (being called a flat earther). Sometimes all three in the same sentence.
At some point, do we stand up for our land and say “no more”?
Can someone make a movie exposing the conspiracy to commit treason and the entrenched media’s complicity in it? Can we mass disseminate the truth?
I would love to see a discussion of the folks I named as its own thread, on these pages.
I can’t see why you label Kuznick a self-hating Jew. Seems like an unprovable attack on his psychology that is not necessary to dispute his political and historical views.
Calling Kuznick a self hating Jew is wrong? Rather, he’s a Marxist who rejects nationalism and religion as bourgeous fantasies. The bolshevics like Trotsky and Zinoviev were Marxists who rejected their Jewish heritage for socialism.
Calling Kuznick a self hating Jew is wrong. Rather, he’s a Marxist who rejects nationalism and religion as bourgeous fantasies. The bolshevics like Trotsky and Zinoviev were Marxists who rejected their Jewish heritage for socialism.
cfbleachers: I too wish someone would produce a documentary exposing the leftist campaign to indoctrinate our children, sabotage our economy, and set the stage for a socialist America. But as a conservative filmmaker in Los Angeles, I can tell you that such a movie (at least one with high production values) will not be made. It requires a budget of five to ten million dollars or more to produce and market a high-quality documentary that people will want to see in theaters. Conservatives would never finance such a movie – conservatives don’t “believe” in movies or investing in movies. Conservatives prefer to invest their money “sensibly,” retire in luxury and then pass it on to their children – in other words, they want to feather their own nests. The left, in contrast, has been willing to spend the time, effort and money necessary to dominate the arts and the media and from there our culture. We may not like to hear that, but it’s the blunt truth.
“After a successful American air raid on October 5, 1943, the Japanese garrison commander Rear Adm. Shigematsu Sakaibara ordered the execution of the 98 captured American civilian forced laborers remaining on the island. They were taken to the northern end of the island, blindfolded and machine-gunned. One of the prisoners escaped the massacre, carving the message “98 US PW 5-10-43″ on a large coral rock near where the victims had been hastily buried in a mass grave. The unknown American was recaptured and beheaded.”–wiki
Typical Japanese behavior during WWII. In China alone several MILLION people were murdered in cold blood by the Imperial Japanese Army.
Hiroshima?
Payback is a bitch, ain’t it?
I live in Northern China, which Japan invaded before WW2 to seize the steel and agricultural industries to feed their war effort.
There are lots of horror stories what the Japanese did here, and in cities like Nanjing ( “The rape of Nanjing” should be required reading), and many other areas. It was not war, it was brutality on a scale and intensity never seen before or since.
Drop the bomb, drop the bomb, drop the bomb. Let history judge however it likes, but we could not send another American into the Pacific knowing what Japan was capable of and committing.
Revisionism should never be attempted until the writer spends time in the trenches with the people whose history they are about to write about. When i go to towns and villages, i stand out and people want to talk with me and discuss how Americans came to their cities and fought with them against the Japanese, ( the flying tigers are a notable example, but there were thousands of american soldiers fighting alongside Chinese peasants and soldiers alike). They never let me buy the beer, they are eternally grateful for the sacrifices Americans made on their behalf.
I met Oliver Stone once. His Hollywood press agent wasnt around.He was just himself. It was at Vons gocery store in Montecito
California. There pushing a shopping cart was the man who is telling the truth about 10 generations of American history. So lets tell the truth about Ollie.
1. Size: Grossly obese, not 100 lbs overweight. 250 lbs overweight, so fat he could barely waddle. So fat he had to lean on the cart as a sort of walker. The cart being piled high with Twinkies, Cool Whip, Frozen Pizza etc
2. Look:Disgusting appearance. Gray sweatpants stained with piss, a shirt that looked like it had mopped up every food spill atBurger King. Gray ratty hair styled to match the fashion sense of winos in the public drunk tank.
3. Smell. Frankly I smelled Ollie before I recognized him.He had the stench of a public urinal that would not flush and it preceeded and followed him by several yards.
4. Sound. A continous murmur of incoherent drivel as he talked to an imaginary friend only he could see.
But Mr. Oliver Stone..Important Artist, Daring Film Maker and truth teller..is the one we hear about. But for those with the intellect, those with a sense of history and sense of reality can sense the nutcase behind the celluloid lunacy. They can sense the insane wreck I saw in a California supermarket shuffling down the aisles.
Thank you, Mr. Radosh, for your analysis of Henry Wallace. Although in my opinion you are far too kind in your assessments of Obama, suddenly the nature of the present government in Washington has become extremely clear to me.
“Typical Japanese behavior during WWII. In China alone several MILLION people were murdered in cold blood by the Imperial Japanese Army.”
White people do not have a monopoly on racism. Racist attitudes underpinned the very foundation of Japanese militarism. The Japanese of our modern world are also usually racists of the worst kind. They normally treat Koreans like scum of the earth. The Japanese racists during WWII had no hesitation to perform medical experiments on outsiders. Their leaders encouraged rape and murder. White American soldiers were often somewhat bigoted, but they could not even begin to compete with their counterparts in the Japanese Imperial military. Some of them even later married Japanese women. The very idea of butchering Japanese children would have never crossed their mind.
Tom Hanks is no longer a young man. It is very disturbing to see a full grown, middle aged adult make such a fool of himself. The odds are that a large number of younger Americans share his weird belief that racism motivated Americans in their struggle against the Japanese war machine. Our universities are mostly postmodernist, intellectual whorehouses. Leftist professors have captured the softer disciplines. Anyone possessing a soft science credential must be treated like an idiot until proven otherwise.
I wouldn’t get too excited about the Kuznick-Stone documentary. Look how poorly the anti Iraq War films have done at the box office – they’ve all bombed (no pun intended). Other than the usual suspects in Blue State America, no one in Red State America will take their documentary seriously. Based on this article, it is obvious they have nothing new to say.
2. cfbleachers:
At some point, do we stand up for our land and say “no more”?
Yeah, that’s what we’re doing by calling you out for being McCarthyists, racists and flat earthers. Or is it Marxists, socialists and truthers?
You have no standing.
The Soviet declaration of war is overstated as a decisive factor in an August 1945 decision of Japan to surrender. Soviet forces were unable to enter Korea in strength and their strategic interests were concentrated in Manchuria from which to launch a communist takeover of China. An invasion of the home islands would be logistically many months away during which time the Japanese army could hope to bleed an Amwerican invasion force dry in hopes of avoiding an unconditional surrender.
Mr.Stone’s propaganda is apalling but par-for-the-course in academic circles. For the last four decades the chief means of obtaining advancement and tenure in our university system (in the liberal arts at least) is to espouse the crudest forms of anti-American paranoia with the sure knowledge that the speaker is protected by the unique free-speech provisions of that same America. Once upon a time this stance was considered shocking, avant-garde and “transgressive.” Now it is simply another moth-eaten academic conformity. It can’t be abandoned because even the most complacent tenured flack wants to believe that he/she is still, deep-down, a red-hot 1960′s revolutionary. Oh well – to quote Winston Churchill, “Where there is a great deal of free speech there is bound to be a certain amount of foolish speech.”
Great article, Ron. I applaud your “challenge”…
As for these nuggets:
“…reaching such a vast audience of people…”
“…an audience of tens of millions,”
On Showtime??? Nah…I don’t think so.
I’m sure he’s excited since it offers Kuznick an audience many times larger than his classroom…but it’s not nearly as large as he thinks.
This will pass, under the radar of the VAST majority of people…much like Howard Zinn’s celebrity-filled “A People’s History” did.
They will mostly be preaching to the choir..and that choir is growing increasingly smaller day by day…
At the end of my eighth grade school year, my hsitory teacher played some film of WW2. We were done for the year, no more tests or instruction. He played the film without comment.
I watched an entire village of Chinese people being buried alive in a pit which had been dug. Men, women, children, old and young. ALIVE!!! Not shot stabbed or gassed. All perfectly healthy. Buried alive.
A whole village.
Hey, if we didn’t need to use the A bomb, why did it require the use of two before Japan agreed to surrender?
If the emperor hadn’t intervened, Tojo NEVER would have surrendered.
Past experience has been that americans generally aren’t interested in watching anti-american entertainment. The exception would be your self-loathing leftists who will find the thought leadership of this series provides them with a lifetime supply of lies, slogans, and outrage.
Mr Radosh,
Have you any idea how Stone talked Showtime into purchasing his fantasy?
Does that channel, which is supported purely by cable fees and some residuals from the sale of its series, feel they will gain viewers by airing Stone’s visions? Clearly, they must.
But is it more that Stone is a celebrity and they figure that people will watch anything by a celebrity?
I don’t have the channel, and won’t pay them for this kind of thing, so I am greatly looking forward to your review of the series after it airs.
Well,when the strategic decision process on whether or not to drop the atomic bomb was in motion,the Japanese Imperial Army still had more than 4 million men under arms on the Asian mainland and they were working on their own nuclear weapons program..known as the “genzai bakudan” with the help of the Germans,who were supplying refined uranium oxide that was being further processed in the one working Japanese reactor which as located at Konan on the Korean peninsula…had the decision been to not use our own atomic warheads on Japan,and the 2 stage invasion of the mainland been launched in November,1945 and March 1946,that would very likely have been enough time for Japan to have perfected their own device,with disastrous consequences for the Allied invasion forces…so for Stone or anyone else to argue that our utilization of nuclear weapons at that point was unnecessary,is to simply ignore the military realities of the moment and the limited options available to HST…the slaughter was projected to continue for months…by choosing to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki,the slaughter stopped literally overnight…res ipsa loquitur
I wondered how long it would take before the propaganda films would be released to try to change history. Its not enough to have a Left Wing Agenda unless you can get young people to believe that America is a very baaaad country. The old gets what’s going on so we will not be moved but the young are pliable enough if the propaganda is good enough to begin to see this nation in the light in a new statist light. Sad!
8. ehunter,
EWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW!
I am SO SKIPPING LUNCH TODAY.
Well, I’m not surprised. Leftist want to turn everything into a public ‘socialist’ urinal (and when everyone pisses in the same pot where only half the people feel ‘obligated’ to flush, it STINKS).
Bleh
Typo: ‘Leftist/s’ plural.
Uh-oh, it’s Howard Zinn’s replacement… can’t spell right-wing conspiracy without “Oliver Stone,” you know (it’s a plot, the alphabet is a patriachal set-up to conceal that fact).
Showtime deserves blame too.
“Past experience has been that americans generally aren’t interested in watching anti-american entertainment.”
It will be shown all over the world and the people watching will assume that the message is *diluted* by natural patriotism i.e they’ll believe the truth is worse.
Your marxist enemy within creates and inspires enemies outside as well.
Rodesh, you use the following Miscamble quote to discredit Alperovitz’s findings:
“Alperovitz built his approach on a quicksand of faulty assumptions especially as regards the likelihood of an early Japanese surrender, and so contributed handsomely to a generation of confusion and misunderstanding regarding the use of the atomic bomb. The time has come to move beyond him and his distorted “thesis” once and for all.”
To cut through the blather of your own revisionist rant, I challenge you (since we are in the spirit of challenges) to back up this statement with some sort of evidence that counteracts the following realities:
-almost every single American military commander is on the record opposing the bombings on either military or moral grounds, including the following commies: Hap Arnold, Carl Spaatz, Curtis Lemay, Admiral Nimitz, “Bull” Halsey, Strauss, Bard, McCloy AND Douglas MacArthur. These men all believed that the war could have been won without the use of the atomic bombs. I can supply direct quotes from myriad sources if you would like.
Admiral Leahy (another commie leftist) went even further, denouncing Truman’s decision by saying that it fostered an “ethical standard common to the barbarians of the dark ages,” and the use of “(that) barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in the war against Japan.”
-On Japanese surrender (or evidence that you dismiss as quicksand): May 5, 1945, intercepted Japanese message after US broke the codes: “large sections of the Japanese armed forces would not regard with disfavor an American request for capitulation even if the terms were hard, provided they were halfway honorable.”
From the Joint Intelligence Committee (I guess you might call them the KGB) in March 1944 (over a year before the bombings), it is clear that those in the US military and political establishment recognized that “to dethrone or hang the Emperor would cause a tremendous and violent reaction from all Japanese, (as it) would be comparable to the crucifixion of Christ to us.” What is the import of this statement? In the final draft of the Potsdam Declaration, the words “unconditional surrender” were added, which indicates either Truman’s incomprehension of what that term meant, his conscious decision to go ahead with using the bomb knowing full well the Japanese would not surrender the Emperor, or a colossal communications failure that prevented the intelligence assessment on the import of the Emperor to the Japanese people from reaching Truman prior to Potsdam (which might be blamed on Roosevelt). Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, the only historian who has been able to access the Japanese archives, Russian archive and US archives (as he knows all three languages), argues that Truman knew full well that the Japanese had been seeking out favorable surrender terms since at least March 1945. How does Hasegawa back this up? In addition to citing the Joint Intelligence appraisal, the same way Alperovitz and Bart Bernstein and Martin Sherwin and J. Samuel Walker and Robert J. Lifton and Greg Mitchell and Ron Takaki and Kai Bird and David McCullough and even Richard Frank do – by citing Truman himself:
July 18, 1945 (from Truman’s diary):
“P.M. [ Churchill ] & I ate alone. Discussed Manhattan (it is a success). Decided to tell Stalin about it. Stalin had told P.M. of telegram from Jap Emperor asking for peace. Stalin also read his answer to me. It was satisfactory. Believe the Japs will fold up before Russia comes in.”
While we are on the subject of Truman’s diary, let’s look at a few other passages:
July 17, 1945:
(Truman knows that Soviet entry into the war will spell the end of Japan regardless of US action):
“He’ll (Stalin will) be in the Jap war on August 15th. Fini Japs when that comes about.” Actually, the Soviet Union entered on August 8, 2 days after Hiroshima. Hasegawa echoes Alperovitz’s “distorted” thesis when he claims that Truman actually used the bomb to show the Soviets who would be in charge of the post-war order.
July 18th, after the Trinity test, “Believe Japs will fold up before Russia comes in.”
July 25th, “This weapon is to be used against Japan between now and August 10th. I have todl the Sec. of War, Mr. Stimson to use so that military objectives and soldiers and sailors are the target and not women and children. Even if the Japs are savages, ruthless, merciless, and fanatic, we as the leader of the world for the common welfare cannot drop this terrible bomb on the old Capital or the new Tokyo. He and I are in accord. The target will be a purely military one and we will issue a warning statement asking the Japs to surrender and save lives.”
We know how that worked out. Truman couldn’t justify the bomb’s use then, even before he used the bomb on innocent women and children, and anyone who tries to defend the use of these weapons today by saying that the Japanese were fanatical or ruthless denies that there were myriad alternatives that Truman himself pondered AND PREFERRED just days prior to Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Obviously, counter to your revisionist claim that Alperovitz’s argument has long been discredited, his thesis has been backed up time and time again by many scholars. Hasegawa is only the latest (2006) in a long line of support.
Rodesh, you make hyperbolic assertions about the end results in Southeast Asia (without contemplating the ruinous rise of Pol Pot as a result of catastrophic US bombing, just as one example) without acknowledging the reality that had the US not become involved in Vietnam to begin with, the resulting situation would not be any different than it was, minus the deaths of 58,000 American soldiers and (by commie Robert McNamara’s assessment) 3.8 million Vietnamese.
How do you prove that Peter Kuznick is a “self-hating Jew?” I can appreciate your challenge to his argument intellectually, but that claim is a disgusting and uncalled for insult, especially directed toward a man who lost his entire family to the Nazis and whose entire intellectual genesis and development revolved around fighting fascism, militarism, social control and mass murder. As Jews, we are sick and tired of the right wing telling us that we are less Jewish if we call into question the results of hyper-militarism. And, we are sick and tired of the right wing dismissing us as “self-hating” commies if we champion the causes of free speech, the working class and other oppressed people across the world. We celebrate Passover, fast on Yom Kippur, go to synagogue and practice Tikkun Olam. Lest we forget the legacy of proud Jews throughout this country’s history who fought for our right to become Americans. Those Jews include Clara Lemlich (who, at age 19, led a march of Jewish female textile workers down 5th avenue to protest the working conditions of Jewish textile workers and Rose Schneiderman, just to name two of many. By the way, these women were not socialists as I’m sure you would dismiss them. They declined membership in the socialist party in favor of becoming a part of the mainstream (and very conservative) women’s temperance and suffrage movements. We Jews may be in a more comfortable position today to critique the left, but many of our great-grandparents could not afford to be so complacent. If they had, the may very well have perished, as six million did in Germany not so very long ago. Something to ponder over your Passover Sedar, Rodesh and followers.
As for Oliver Stone, his views are certainly controversial and you might not agree with them, but you might want to consider challenging him on an intellectual basis rather than continuously hitting him below the belt. It makes people think that you don’t have any real intellectual critique and therefore adds fuel to Stone’s fire. Back up your rant with evidence and we can continue this discussion. Otherwise, move out of the way.
I apologize for spelling Radosh’s name wrong throughout my post.
Dave II-
I hope this series does not go the way of Zinn’s “People’s History of the United States.” Zinn is the main textbook for many advanced courses in US history in American high schools. Most adults only know Zinn from Matt Damon’s reference in “Good Will Hunting” but their kids know Zinn because he is the lens through which they have learned US history.
Maybe that’s what Kuznick is referring to when he says “tens of millions.” Perhaps he will get an even bigger audience because the vido format is easy to use outside of advanced classes.
It is very disturbing to see a full grown, middle aged adult make such a fool of himself. The odds are that a large number of younger Americans share his weird belief that racism motivated Americans in their struggle against the Japanese war machine.
I do believe that readers of this contribution and the comments on it would enjoy and profit from a reading of my essay, “Long Ago: The Pacific War Came to an Unimaginable End” in History News Network for August 31, 2009. My position there, as a four plus years participant in World War II in the Navy is that President Truman, as Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces could make no other decision than to use the Atom Bomb initially at the time he did. (If I could put a live cross reference here to my article I would; maybe someone else can do it for me.)
May I ruminate a moment? This AM’s newspaper has a long essay contending that architects and engineers with brains are joining his crusade to declare that the World Trade Center was cleverly dynamited, due to a major home grown conspiracy. Meanwhile, those who were not even a gleam in the eye contend that it wasn’t worth the effort to avoid invading the Japan of autumn, 1945. Soon those of us who know better will be gone. Same with the 9/11 truth, which we saw with our own eyes, complete with aircraft flying into the buildings. Surely this Country, with its huge education system, enormous (though shrinking) press, and multitude of internet sites need not allow history to turn into myth without protesting here, there, everywhere….
Vaughn Davis Bornet, Ph.D. (Stanford, ’51), CDR (USNR, ret) Ashland, Oregon
10. Truth always has standing, and lies never do.
Oliver Stone’s sidekick, Peter Kuznick, has an unfortunate past association with Lyndon LaRouche, having been the leader of the LaRoucheist local in Colorado many years ago (we’re talking ’70s and ’80s).
Peter didn’t know what he was talking about then, and, a few decades and a few degrees later, he still doesn’t.
However, the LaRouchies must be thrilled. Not only did their candidate win a Democratic Congressional primary in Texas (tells you what shape the Democratic Party is in, in that C.D.), but now–and not for the first time–they can cozy up to Oliver Stone.
The LaRouchies first fell in love with Stone around the production of “JFK,” because L. Fletcher Prouty, played in the movie by Donald Sutherland, hung out with LaRouche “Security” honchos Jeff Steinberg and Paul Goldstien.
I know something about Wallace, having written my MA on him, having spent a full day with him at his farm in South Salem NY, and having researched his life and having written a very critical review of his life for The New Republic
I remember that review very well, Mr. Radosh. It was the first time I had ever read anything you wrote and I recall thinking that I would certainly keep an eye out for anything with your byline on it, because the piece on Wallace was brilliant.
A few posters have taken issue with Mr. Radosh’s characterization of Kuznick as a self-hating Jew. The professor, the son of Holocaust survivors, hates the US military. Without the US military, the odds that Kuznick would have seen the light of day are slender at best. (I’m sure he credits the Soviet Army for his parents survival; well, the average Ivan fought bravely, but the USSR was aided considerably by the aid we gave Stalin, not to mention the fact that Hitler fought a 2 front war.) One wonders why Kuznick’s parents didn’t stay in Eastern Europe to enjoy the blissful post-war Utopia of Soviet-dominated Communism, but instead came to the evil, capitalist US. Yeah, I’d call him a self-hater.
But self-hatred is the disease of the Western Left and they want to infect us all with their own self-loathing, which they mistake for virtue. No other culture or race trashes its own customs and history and institutions and traditional religions like Western leftists routinely trash theirs. No racism, no cruelty, no violence, no injustice matters unless it is committed by white Western capitalists. As I noted in the other thread, they are blind to the fact that they are the biggest racists of all. If racism, violence and cruelty is to be ignored when say, the Japanese enslave Southeast Asians or African tribes hack each other to bits with machetes, but is terribly important when whites do it, what does that say but that only the actions of white people have moral weight. All the little brown and black and yellow people can’t be judged or condemned because apparently (in Leftist eyes), only whites have a moral compass. Everyone else is just a victim or a puppet; only whites can be villains.
Kuznick and all leftists are like a man rotting away from syphilis or AIDS who is angry because other people are still healthy. Not only that, but the man is under the delusion that being healthy is wrong and being diseased is morally correct.
And, we are sick and tired of the right wing dismissing us as “self-hating” commies if we champion the causes of free speech, the working class and other oppressed people across the world.
Oh, right. The left was incredibly concerned by the mountains of corpses created by Communist dictators during the 20th century. Lillian Hellman and George Bernard Shaw publicly disavowed Stalin after the show trials of the ’30′s – oh wait, they didn’t. Western lefties stepped right up to the plate during China’s cultural revolution and denounced Mao. Well not exactly. They stood foursquare with the masses shipped to the Gulag; except that they thought Reagan was even worse. They wept buckets of tears when they found out about Iraqi children’s prisons – or would have, if they weren’t so busy focusing on panties on the head at Gitmo. Stone, I’m sure, is very concerned about the Venezuelan students who marched against the sinister clown who is running their country into the ground. Just like he really feels for Cuban dissidents rotting away in holes because they crossed Castro. Singer, I’m sure you worried about the Vietnamese shipped off to reeducation camps after Saigon fell. Uh huh. Face it, you didn’t give those people another thought once the last US helicopter flew away. None of the anti-war crowd did – it would have destroyed “the narrative.”
What I am sick and tired of is the left pretending it gives one cr*p about the “oppressed” or “the working class.” After the abattoir the Left made of the 20th century, the idea would be laughable if it wasn’t obscene. Oh, maybe the youthful and ignorant naifs who are drawn to leftism in their college years (helped by the indoctrination of tools like Kuznik) mean well. But people like Kuznik and Stone do not have the excuse of being young and foolish. No, they’re old fools, desperately clinging to an utterly failed and discredited ideology. It isn’t about compassion – they are still suckers for the fantasy of Utopia, of an enlightened, all-powerful government that will create heaven on earth for humans. And if other humans stand in the way and need to be disposed of, well, you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs. Of course, as Orwell said, “Where’s the omelet?”
And as for “free speech,” well, that’s a laugh too, seeing how it’s the campus leftists who have imposed speech codes on campuses and routinely shout down any conservative speakers who dare show their face on campus. You’re for “free speech,” Singer, like Col. Sanders is for vegetarianism.
I don’t grant you even an iota of moral superiority; in fact, I believe that anybody who sticks to their belief in leftist ideology at this stage in the game is a moral midget. “Compassion” has nothing to do with it; feeling part of an elite and shoving your beliefs and ideology down the throats of the masses (by force if necessary) while lying to yourself that you are noble and caring is what leftism is all about. Stinking hypocrites, the lot of you. And the unfortunate identification of many Jews with the left only serves to disprove the stereotype that you’re all intelligent. Leftism among American Jews made some sense when pogroms were taking place in Czarist Russian; at this stage in the game, it’s simply a sentimental attachment and, considering that the most virulent anti-Semites are now on the left, it is a very dangerous one.
And if the thought of Stone, Kuznik and this Singer commenter sitting in comfortable homes (in Stone’s case, a mansion)in places like Cambridge and Georgetown and Malibu flattering themselves that they “know” the “working class” and the “oppressed” isn’t puke-inducing, I don’t know what is. Yeah, sure, I have no doubt they’re nice to the illegal immigrant who comes to clean their toilets. She leaves them free to do their oh-so-important work which is helping the masses oh-so-much.
But the real masses? Plenty of working class people showing up at those tea parties and oh how the left hates and despises them. Ordinary people who don’t hate capitalism and don’t want to suck at the government teat? Why those hicks! What trash! Why, they must be racist Uncle Joe knew what to do with such kulaks.
For Stone or anyone else to argue that our utilization of nuclear weapons at that point was unnecessary,is to simply ignore the military realities of the moment and the limited options available to HST…the slaughter was projected to continue for months…by choosing to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki,the slaughter stopped literally overnight.
It is interesting how careful archival research that exposes facts which portray the United States acting like many other imperial powers throughout history is considered “anti-American.”
As Stephen Colbert has noted — reality contains a well known liberal bias.
Speaking from experience doing research for this project, I suggest the armchair critics on this thread do a little bit of their own footwork of their own in the various archives around the U.S. before they start casting stones. The documentation to support the claims made in this series exist. The documents themselves aren’t “leftist.” Put up or shut up. I would start at the FDR library in Hyde Park, NY.
By the way Mr. Radosh — you may want to read some more literature before making further claims about the historiography of various subjects. For instance, your attack on Gar Alpoveritz’s thesis on the foreknowledge of a Japanese surrender is historical fact, not conjecture. Alpoveritz overstated some things, but not this particular historical tidbit. Check out the decidedly non-leftist account and supporting documentary evidence of this fact in J. Samuel Walker’s “Prompt and Utter Destruction.” Furthermore, U.S. officials did, in fact, inflate casualty projections after the bomb was dropped in order to justify the attack. Translation: Radosh, you’re barking up the wrong tree and the historical record suggests the opposite of your insinuations that the U.S. did not have other options at it’s disposal.
The individuals here and elsewhere attacking facts and using blanket terms like “leftist” to mask their ignorance of well-documented historical research are playing an old game: Repeat falsehoods until they are accepted. Unfortunately for them, they will be the last to realize that historical facts cannot be wiped away by incessant name calling.