The Continuing Stalinist Delusions of Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick: A Final Assessment
The old totalitarian nations understood the importance of history. They believed, as Orwell wrote in 1984, that those who controlled the narrative of the past would be better able to rule the present and the future. That is why the Soviets continually rewrote the “Great Soviet Encyclopedia,” airbrushing out of the record former Bolshevik leaders who had been purged, and rewriting accounts of their own revolution to weed out positive references to the likes of Leon Trotsky, Nikolai Bukharin, and other old Bolsheviks. That is why the Chinese Communists have to perpetuate the myth of Mao, whose leadership role has to remain firm, less their own legitimacy to rule China be questioned by their own people.
In their own way, Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick are attempting the same kind of rewrite for their own country. Clifford May writes that “these days, documentaries, too, often are weapons of mass indoctrination. In addition to airing Homeland, Showtime has been broadcasting Oliver Stone’s Untold History of the United States, a series that re-litigates the Cold War, finding Truman more to blame than Stalin, telling audiences that Americans not only aren’t ‘the good guys,’ but that we are ‘the wrong side.’”
“This debate is of far more than academic interest,” May adds:
It is hugely consequential at a time when Americans are trying to decide whether we should be robustly defending America and other free nations from those who proclaim themselves our enemies, or whether we should be attempting to address the ‘legitimate grievances’ of those we have supposedly wronged.
Hence, if you believe that the Cold War was caused by America’s imperial outreach, and that Stalin and his henchman took a tough line because of U.S. policy, you are likely to believe today that those who say our nation has very real enemies who have to be recognized are arguing on behalf of a myth, and that what the United States should do is unilaterally disarm, cut our military budget drastically, and reach out to our Muslim enemies, who would become friends if we only showed them respect and deference and, of course, put great pressure on Israel, whose provocative policies oppress the Palestinians and Israel’s Arab neighbors.
PJM readers know that I have been on a campaign to expose and challenge the so-called history offered to our countrymen by Stone and Kuznick. Aside from my many articles on this site, I penned an op-ed that appeared last week in The Wall Street Journal, which I wrote because I knew Stone and Kuznick would not ignore an article that appeared in a major newspaper, unlike those that have appeared here as well as the series in David Horowitz’s Frontpagemag.com. I am glad to report that now Conrad Black has joined in presenting his own major critique of the series, and now his readers will understand how important it is to challenge their account. In “The Real Henry Wallace,” Black successfully demolishes the account of the principal hero of the TV series.
To all of us who have done extensive archival research on any subject touching on the Cold War, the encounter between Ron Radosh and Stone-Kuznick is especially painful. We are lucky to have a determined historian ready to counter all the neocommunist propaganda. I have had a similar experience when I reviewed a deceptive book on Hemingway’s supposed spy mission to China in 1941, only to see the communist sympathies of Hemingway and Gellhorn mainstreamed by HBO in their recent film on Hemingway’s third marriage, where Chou En-lai is given a favorable slant, much as Peter Moreira did in his much admired book (admired by the Left). See http://clarespark.com/2011/06/30/links-to-review-essay-on-hemingway-spy-mission-to-china/.
I agree. God Bless Ron Radosh!
Highly recommended to all:
http://www.amazon.com/Bloodlands-Europe-Between-Hitler-Stalin/dp/0465031471/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1358647556&sr=8-1&keywords=bloodlands+europe+between+hitler+and+stalin
Snyder’s book not only debunks the scurrilous nonsense Stone and Kuznick are trying to purvey, but makes it clear beyond the shadow of a doubt how bad Stalin was.
Great book about one of the drakest times in history and players involved. Stalin remains second to Hitler in terms of abject evil, but not by much. The starvation of the Ukraine was one of the most deadly acts in history. No amount of rehabilitation will change Stalin’s legacy, except to the deranged and the Stoned.
One has only to read “In the Court of the Red Czar” to understand the true evil of Stalin. By my count, if you divide the number he killed, by the number of words in the book [900+ pages] every “and”,”of”, and “the” equals a family of five. Of the two it is Stalin, not Hitler, who is the great destroyer. That Stone and company see him as sympathetic is evidence of a pathological willful ignorance; but we knew that, didn’t we.
The assertion that Stalin was hard on Eastern Europe only because the West “made him do it” is laughable in a schoolyard sense of responsibility. How Stone and others can make this claim with a straight face defies comprehension.
Concise summary – Stone and Kuznick are slimy anti-American Communist assholes.
I’d like to see the both of them time-transported back to Stalin’s USSR and open their cowardly little cakeholes in just one anti-Politburo diatribe. Nothing wakes up an idiot faster than personal exposure to reality.
Without a doubt the best distilation of liberal historical illiteracy is Will Hunting’s rant at his NSA interview in the film Good Will Hunting.
There’s a great take on this in,”Good Will Hunting’s Rant” at:
http://john-moloney.blogspot.com/
COWBOYS & COMMUNISTS (under a cowgirl moon)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFKkSv6mcLc
Your first paragraph hits it on the head: Orwell’s novel at its heart is about perception. When it comes to liberals, it’s a diabolical syndrome, since I cannot read minds. Do they really believe the tripe they put forward or do they know they’re are lying. If they’re lying, to what purpose?
Mr. Radosh challenges perception with facts, therefore altering perception and overturns the documentary’s centerpiece. In order to do that effectively one needs access to a place one can affect pop culture narratives.
But liberals lie – a lot. The question is again how many really believed the GOP and Romney are racists, as the Dems put out again and again last year, simply because there’s not a lot of ethnic mix in their soup.
Is the NHL then racist? Isn’t it really a case of ethnic minorities not coming rather than being put off? Why should the GOP, or the NHL for that matter, pander racially. That’s what Dems do, even while they assert they are forced to in the name of justice. Expand other liberal memes out a hundredfold and you have the liberal universe – one that actually doesn’t exist and never has. It’s like the Fantastic Four fighting Dr. Doom but never seeing him except by shadows and the swirling currents of events. After awhile reasonable people would say “enough.”
Liberals are not reasonable people – they are mental cases. How many are straight up liars and how many have a pathological bent towards blame and self-pity combined with an exaggerated sense of evil in the world where they expect it rather than where it actually is, is unknown.
The oddest thing about liberals is their assertions of evil in today’s world and history are something they are so challenged to actually show they have to lie about it. That’s okay – they “know” it’s there, so why not lie?
Maybe the non-WASPs are racists because they refuse to join the Republican party. Don’t want to associate with a bunch of “old white men.”
Simply shocking that these loons bury the lede, that a sitting Vice President was on his own and without any authorization form FDR meeting with a KGB operative. As always though leftists conflate the failings of McCarthyism with the insane idea that the Soviets and communists were a benevolent foroe for good. Like mom told you 2 wrongs don’t make a right. And comparatively Mccarthy was far and away the lesser wrong.
The little I saw of this nonsense was Bizzaro Cold War; if only America was nice(for lack of a better adjective) the USSR wouldn’t have enslaved Eastern Europe nor killed 30 million in the gulags.
Stone’s son has converted to Islam recently. No doubt his dad’s hatred of America played a role.If America sucks so bad, mr. Stone, leave. No one iss topping you.
Im reminded of CNN’s The Cold War series in the late 90′s where Jeremy Issacs made false equivalence of the US with McCarthyism and Stalin’s post WW2 purges, show trials, and gulags.
But besides that, one must always remember that in the Communists on terminology the US was reactionary to their Revolutionary movement. The Soviet Communist Imperialists were driving the Cold War, and the US and it’s allies were reacting to it/them.
It was with a frisson of pleasure that I saw Ron Radosh in the WSJ 1/11/13, one of “my people”. I also saw the rejoinder letter by Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick. At that point my response was, “meh”, but this post got me thinking. Which side is trying to get at the truth?
In 1945 looking back on the horror of war and the atomic bomb it is somewhat natural to think to put that much power as far away from you as possible as did Henry Wallace. But only if you ignore human nature.
In the modern era to put your faith in an institution so feckless as to put Zimbabwe on the human rights council is foolish indeed. Oliver Stone is not a foolish man, so something else must be at work.
In WWII the U.S.S.R. was perfectly happy to align with the Nazis, right up until they attacked. That shift changed the war and the U.S. did the supplying while the U.S.S.R. did the dying in that war between totalitarian states.
To pretend to Cold War could have been avoided if only Joseph Stalin was unopposed is as foolish as thinking that Islam can be appeased into letting us live and let live. It requires that one ignore history, human nature and what your enemy says about their own intentions.
It is quite clear which side is trying to get at the truth.
I didn’t watch Stone and Kuznick’s historical hallucination, but from the description offered you have to wonder why it was even aired on Showtime. Why hasn’t their crockumentary been slammed by their little buddies in the MSM? And why this perpetual mega-disconnect by the left for the twenty million that Stalin killed?
Maybe Stone and Kuznick will someday make a crockumentary about why evil forces in Congress falsely claimed they had to dismantle a lot of what Obama did in order to save the country. I would watch that crockumentary.
“And why this perpetual mega-disconnect by the left for the twenty million that Stalin killed?”
The left? Maybe the crazy left of which Radosh was a part, but liberals like myself knew of Stalin’s evil long before RR swung to the crazy right.
Transparent deployment of the True Scotsman fallacy. Obviously, no “true leftist” ever approved of Stalin – only the crazy, deluded, fake leftists.
Bullshit. If conservatives have to own our evil, racist past, then liberals have to own their naive, idiotic, anti-American flirtations with the CPSU.
Own it, Hillel…
Conservatives don’t HAVE a racist past. Democrats and the left have always been the party of racism. It is a tool to divide the voluntary associations of men and replace them with forced statist constructs in which all are ‘equal’. It is used when class envy doesn’t come easily–racial envy is easily incited as the ‘facts’ are visible from the skin.
If ‘liberals’ like yourself knew all about Stalin, it is a pity that the ‘liberals’ of the time were so busy making excuses for Stalin.
If they really did know, then that makes them willing tools of evil.
Clare Spark is right, we owe Ron Radosh a huge debt of thanks for combating the Stone nonsense. I expect Stone will be mainstreamed in the university ala Foner and Fast. It is important that the true record be asserted.
Stalin was such a nice guy. His deal with Hitler to divide up Poland and grind it into dust shows his great humanitarian spirit.
In fact he and Hitler admired each other despite the fact that they were at heart enemies. So, if Hitler admired Stalin……….
and Stone admires Stalin, I’d say Stone and Hitler seem to have something in common. Maybe that’s not the only thing?
”and asked for unspecified Soviet assistance in supporting the progressive faction in the Truman administration against the anti-Soviet hard-liners.”
Asking for KGB assistance in subverting the American political system and that is argued away. What more obvious evidence is needed to show that this creature was a deliberate traitor and that Stone is a dishonest, anti-American tool?
You are right, traitor is appropriate to define Wallace.
As an old Cold Warrior I can’t believe we’re still having to defend this nonsense. Can you imagine Showtime doing a program defending the Nazis? It reminds me of a conversation I had years ago with a Euroweenie Lefty during the Jörg Haider nonsense. I asked why Haiders comments and associations were any worse then any of the commies in the various Euroweenie governments. To his credit his honest answer was “Because we are lefties”.
What does that say about the management of Showtime?
Good grief Charlie Brown…
Last year I took a military history class in which the teacher took the standard academia line that the Soviets were a paper tiger, and never a threat to our way of life or on a conventional warfare footing. We went back and forth a little during the semester. Then during our study of Vietnam, I made the comment, “So, you acknowledge that following WWII and up into the 80′s, you had leaders like Kruschev constantly making threats that the West would fall (including in his book Conquest Without War, which I read when I was 12 years old). You had the absorption of satellite nations all over Eastern and Western Europe. You had intelligence reports constantly asserting Soviet nuclear stockpile and military buildups. And you had the Soviets actively fomenting Communist revolution in Southeast Asia and all over Latin America. You admit they had nuclear stockpiles and the will to use them. You admit all of this, and you STILL think the Soviets were a paper tiger? You STILL think that they weren’t a danger to our national existence? You STILL think they weren’t a danger to us in a conventional warfare sense?”
To her credit, she looked at me, thought about it for a minute, and said, “Wow, I never thought of it like that. I guess they actually WERE a threat to us.”
“…you are likely to believe today that those who say our nation has very real enemies who have to be recognized are arguing on behalf of a myth, and that what the United States should do is unilaterally disarm….”
Radosh distorts leftist positions in an article attacking historical distortions. So what else is new?
“A small man, with little or no imagination, pushing small ideas and trying to pass them off as transformational changes.”
Nope, but thanks for asking.
In february 1965, former French President, General DE GAULLE, predicted, during a press conference, the monetary crisis, the USA have brought the world in today. He then, asked for the return to a gold standard…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i-g2iGskFPE&feature=player_embedded
W76: How prescient was de Gaulle to ask for a return to the gold standard in 1965 … when the gold standard was STILL IN EFFECT? Amazing. Get back to the topic.
It isn’t just totalitarians who try to control the future by controlling the past.
During the Jim Crow era, pro-Southern historians aggressively promoted the “Tragic Era” version of Reconstruction: monstrously corrupt carpetbaggers put in power by the votes of ignorant half-witted blacks. By the early 1900s, they had everyone believing this account, including white non-Southerners. Even most Republicans came to believe that white supremacy and disfranchisement of blacks was a practical necessity in the South, and there was no constituency for Federal intervention to overturn it. (Yes, there was corruption in the Reconstruction South – but not much worse than afterwards, or elsewhere.)
In that case, the rewriters had a very powerful material interest at stake. At other times, they don’t. Pro-Communist revisionism is an emotional drive; the Left wants to redeem its past and tear down the Right’s past.
It’s pathetic, really. It’s a fact that many conservatives were on the wrong side of the civil rights issue much of the time: William F. Buckley in the early days of National Review, for instance, and that it was liberals who did the heavy lifting in that struggle. But Buckley himself admitted he’d been wrong, and modern conservatives don’t defend the Klan or Jim Crow, or the old conservatives who did. (On the other hand, modern liberals still cry “Racism!” at the drop of a hat, and continually level accusations of racism at conservatives. It’s as though they are unwilling to give up a weapon…)
It’s also a fact that many liberals were foolishly sympathetic to Communism, and that conservatives did the heavy lifting in that struggle. Today’s liberals should follow the Buckley example, instead of the Stone-Kuznick. Instead they want to discredit anti-Communism. It’s as though they want to take away a weapon…