This Weekend, Oliver Stone Will Not be a Happy Man: Now The New York Times Takes Him On!
Oliver Stone and his co-author Peter Kuznick are not going to be happy this week. After making scores of media appearances in which he heralded the supposedly great reception for his new TV series and accompanying book, Oliver Stone’s Untold History of the United States, which airs each week for 10 episodes on the CBS-owned network Showtime, Stone is finally getting the negative response he feared.
First, Stone was hit hard by Michael Moynihan at Newsweek/The Daily Beast. Declaring Stone and Kuznick’s film “junk history,” Moynihan called Stone’s work “swivel-eyed, ideological history,” based on “dubious quotes and sources,” a veritable “marvel of historical illiteracy.” Coming on the heels of my own debunking of Stone, “A Story Told Before: Oliver Stone’s Recycled History of the United States,” Stone and Kuznick received two substantive critiques in one week.
Stone, of course, completely ignored my own substantive article, alluding to it without naming me as an example of “a few far-right diatribes” that do not warrant response. Stone bragged that “the majority of reviews and articles have been positive,” until that is – the piece by Moynihan that he had to answer since it appeared in what he considers a mainstream media venue. Since the original author has the last word, Moynihan hit Stone hard in his own answer, that appears after Stone’s response as an update. Moynihan easily further demolishes Stone and Kuznick, concluding after presenting more evidence that their work “is activism masquerading as history.”
This Sunday, however, Stone and Kuznick will be even more upset. The New York Times Magazine features a story by editor Andrew Goldman, “Oliver Stone Rewrites History-Again.” Goldman’s story, which summarizes Stone’s theory behind the TV series and has many vignettes based on his own interview with the director, notes among other things that Stone never really took back his incendiary comment that there is “Jewish domination of the media” and that Israel’s “powerful lobby in Washington” controls U.S. foreign policy. The apology he supposedly made to the Anti-Defamation League was forced on him to avoid cancellation of “Untold History,” and Stone now told Goldman that he should not have used the word “Jewish,” but that Israel has “seeming control over American foreign policy” and that AIPAC has “undue influence.” He accuses them of “militating for the war in Iraq,” completely ignoring that in fact, Israel did not favor the war, considering Iran its major enemy, and that AIPAC in particular never lobbied on its behalf. Each time Stone explains himself, he further puts his foot in his mouth.
When Goldman eventually gets to the new Showtime series, readers learn that Stone’s accolades come mainly when he presents his film to sympathetic viewers from the far left Nation magazine, as in a forum held in New York after the annual New York Film Festival. Referring to the magazine as “the left’s beloved 147 year-old weekly,” Goldman quotes its editor and publisher Katrina vanden Heuvel, as saying that Stone’s film “is what we try to do at The Nation,” which if anything, is more of a giveaway about its reliability than she imagines. That she sees the film as challenging “the orthodoxy” and the “conformity of our history” is a statement that should, if anything, be very embarrassing to those who think she has any credibility.
And may I recommend Ron Radosh’s excellent survey of Hobsbawm obituaries? I recorded my own responses to Hobsbawm’s first book in the famed tetralogy here: http://clarespark.com/2012/11/23/historians-vs-pundits-the-eric-hobsbawm-synthesis/. Radosh has shown himself to be a real historian, and not a flunkey for Stalinism, as the esteemed Hobsbawm clearly was.
What Radosh has written here gives me hope that we are climbing out of the abyss. Maybe.
Last week I happened to be tuning around and stumbled across an episode of Stone’s show on Showtime and was horrified to see it repeating the Communist party line of that time. I contacted Showtime and was told it was part of the network’s commitment to provocative and controversial programming.
I also wrote on piece on this and some other recent episodes along the same line.http://havechanged.blogspot.com/2012/11/showtimes-agitprop.html
I am glad, and pleasantly surprised, to see the Times take him on.
However, here’s what Stone is accomplishing even when criticized. After I saw the episode I found an LA Times review which criticized the show as too one-sided but then went on to note:
“That President Harry S. Truman’s decision to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima had as much if not more to do with establishing America’s dominance in the postwar politics than ending the war with Japan is something that activists, politicians and historians have discussed virtually from the moment he made it.”
I just read your own blog and it’s first rate. Glad to see others are taking Stone on and letting Showtime know.
Dr. Radosh:
I remember buying and reading your seminal book “The Rosenberg File” way back in 1985; it changed the way I began to view post-WW II Soviet history and policy (thanks to the Verona cables that is). One would think that with the increased access to Soviet files since 1991, history would be a little clearer to those who sympathized with the USSR and show them the unvarnished truth. Much to my chagrin (since Stone appears to have some redeeming qualities), I’m stumped as to why the man refuses to acknowledge these truths about Stalin and his tyranny of terror. He can still argue with legitimacy that indeed, American history textbooks have discounted the enormity of the war that Russia waged with Germany with its attendant loss of life and, at the same time, recognize the monstrosity of the political system and its ruthless military which brought Hitler and Germany to its knees. Nor do I understand his anti-Semitism and why he clings to the base canard, repeatedly debunked time and time again, that the media is controlled by a cabal of Jewish interests. He might as well hawk “Protocols of the Elders of the Zion” on Showtime. Would they go for it? I wonder. I look forward to see if Mr. Stone is willing to go to the mat with you in public as you have challenged him to. Probably not and if he has any critical gray matter, he’ll respectfully decline. But you never know – he might just bite since, as the NYTimes Magazine author notes, he is very sensitive to criticism of his work.
This isn’t about whether Oliver Stone is wrong or right. This article and Stone’s potential reaction is all about a clash of ideology . . . and nothing else. Who is to say whether Stone or Mr. Radosh is right or wrong?
Why isn’t it about whether Stone is right or wrong? Americans of the past are being painted by Stone’s brush. He is no different than Howard Zinn. He rewrites history to satisfy his own sense of right and wrong with today’s sense of social justice which encompasses not a whit of understanding of the way things were back then and why.
Presentism is a false way to look at history. It is quite valid to say “Oh that was cruel” or something of that nature if you include, “by today’s standards which we use”. Stone is a flamer– but a good entertainer.
The Miami Herald published a stinging review the day before the show debuted.
http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/11/11/3089382/the-truth-is-out-there-but-you.html