{"id":836,"date":"2013-04-10T01:31:56","date_gmt":"2013-04-09T23:31:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/?p=836"},"modified":"2015-04-28T02:03:16","modified_gmt":"2015-04-28T00:03:16","slug":"oliver-stones-history-lesson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/oliver-stones-history-lesson\/","title":{"rendered":"Oliver Stone&#8217;s history lesson"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>American filmmaker Oliver Stone is fascinated by history and those who make it. His <i>JFK<\/i>, <i>Nixon<\/i>, <i>World Trade Center<\/i> and <i>W.<\/i> have attempted to fill the gaps in our knowledge of what happened and what may have happened at key points in US history. Now he&#8217;s filled the gaps in his own timeline in an <span id=\"tooltip5523175742629\">ambitious<\/span> documentary called <i>Oliver Stone&#8217;s Untold History of the United States<\/i>.<\/p>\n<p>The ten one-hour-long <span id=\"tooltip5523175742a10\">installments<\/span>, shown on the Showtime movie channel since November 2012, feature continuous <span id=\"tooltip5523175742df9\">narration<\/span> by Stone over constantly changing imagery, real or dramatized, and <span id=\"tooltip55231757431e0\">occasional<\/span> quotes by historical figures, many of which are spoken by actors. It&#8217;s <span id=\"tooltip55231757435c8\">accompanied<\/span> by a 750-page book that contains 100 pages of notes. Like the series, it was co-written by Peter J. Kuznick, a historian at American University.<\/p>\n<p>The words &#8220;untold history&#8221; in the title are good for sales, but a more accurate title would be <i>US Foreign Policy from 1939 to 2012<\/i>. The documentary is not about America at all, but about what the US has done abroad, <span id=\"tooltip55231757439b6\">well-meaning<\/span> or otherwise. Hardly any of this is untold to anyone living outside the US, or to anyone who has studied at a quality US university. It is fair to say, though, that the story in its entirety is unfamiliar to most Americans.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"http:\/\/www.dailymotion.com\/embed\/video\/xym5fj\" width=\"440\" height=\"247\" frameborder=\"0\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>In clear, linear fashion, Stone explains how and why the United States came to see itself as the world&#8217;s policeman, how special interests clouded the judgement of <span id=\"tooltip5523175743d9e\">the noble-minded<\/span>, and how wrong decisions by inexperienced leaders got the US into ever greater international <span id=\"tooltip5523175744180\">commitments<\/span> and ever worse <span id=\"tooltip5523175744579\">blunders<\/span>. Harry Truman&#8217;s presidency at the end of World War II, says Stone, created a path of moral <span id=\"tooltip5523175744956\">decline<\/span> that took the US to a darker and darker place \u2014 from dropping atomic bombs on civilians to <span id=\"tooltip5523175744d36\">overthrowing<\/span> elected governments to operating secret <span id=\"tooltip5523175745126\">torture<\/span> camps. <span id=\"tooltip552317574550e\">In short<\/span>, the United States <span id=\"tooltip55231757458f5\">ended up doing<\/span> all the things it accused its enemies of wanting to do.<\/p>\n<h2>A different view<\/h2>\n<p>According to Stone, America&#8217;s participation in every war since 1939 \u2014 particularly the Cold War \u2014 was unnecessary. The enormous US budget for <span id=\"tooltip5523175745cd7\">armaments<\/span> was based on threats that either never <span id=\"tooltip55231757460e7\">materialized<\/span> or that were the result of &#8220;blowback&#8221; when America&#8217;s own actions <span id=\"tooltip5523175748a11\">backfired<\/span>. The Soviet Union, he says, always <span id=\"tooltip5523175748ee7\">negotiated<\/span> from a position of weakness; even Joseph Stalin and Nikita Khrushchev would have preferred peace to an <span id=\"tooltip5523175748fa1\">arms race<\/span> they knew they couldn&#8217;t win. Among the examples he <span id=\"tooltip552317574938e\">cites<\/span> is the <span id=\"tooltip5523175749779\">Cuban Missile Crisis<\/span>, which he points out was actually the Soviet response to the stationing of American missiles in Turkey.<\/p>\n<p>One of Stone&#8217;s most insightful <span id=\"tooltip5523175749b57\">conclusions<\/span> is that by 1945, the US saw the British Empire collapsing and, with it, the global order and stability that the British had <span id=\"tooltip5523175749f3f\">imposed<\/span>. In exchange for America&#8217;s (<span id=\"tooltip552317574a328\">initially<\/span> <span id=\"tooltip552317574a70e\">reluctant<\/span>) support in World War II, Britain would learn to accept a world that the US aimed to make more egalitarian but also more friendly to US business interests.<\/p>\n<p>As with Stone&#8217;s other films, <i>Untold History<\/i> is somewhere around 90 percent fact, five percent <span id=\"tooltip552317574aaf7\">stretching<\/span> the truth and five percent <span id=\"tooltip552317574aedf\">conjecture<\/span>. A lot of what Stone reports was long <span id=\"tooltip552317574b2ce\">suspected<\/span>, but only recently proven as documents became <span id=\"tooltip552317574b6af\">declassified<\/span>. Almost none of it was known at the time to Americans <span id=\"tooltip552317574baa7\">at large<\/span>, who were even more <span id=\"tooltip552317574be7f\">susceptible<\/span> than now to the <span id=\"tooltip552317574c268\">yellow press<\/span> and populist <span id=\"tooltip552317574c64e\">rantings<\/span>. Most of the facts were at least suspected by our leaders, but it&#8217;s hard to imagine they were truly certain about any of them. In their mind, the risks of making even worse decisions were simply too great to <span id=\"tooltip552317574ca37\">justify<\/span> any other <span id=\"tooltip552317574ce25\">course of action<\/span>.<\/p>\n<p>The series ends with a <span id=\"tooltip552317574d20d\">stern<\/span> reminder that those who don&#8217;t learn from the past are condemned to repeat it. <span id=\"tooltip552317574d5f5\">He&#8217;s got a point there.<\/span> The film takes us from the first <span id=\"tooltip552317574d9dd\">Great Depression<\/span> to the second. We&#8217;ve just finished the second Iraq War and are <a title=\"North Korea Warns It Is on Brink of Nuclear War With South (NY Times)\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2013\/04\/10\/world\/asia\/south-korean-leader-seeks-to-end-vicious-cycle-with-north.html\" target=\"_blank\">threatened with<\/a> a second Korean War. A second Cold War, on the horizon with Russia or China or both, wouldn&#8217;t be in anyone&#8217;s interest.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s time to update those history books.<\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<p><strong>R. I. P.<\/strong> <a title=\"Two thumbs up for Roger Ebert (Mike Pilewski)\" href=\"\/blog\/two-thumbs-up-for-roger-ebert\" target=\"_blank\">Roger Ebert<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>American filmmaker Oliver Stone is fascinated by history and those who make it. His JFK, Nixon, World Trade Center and W. have attempted to fill the gaps in our knowledge of what happened and what may have happened at key points in US history. Now he&#8217;s filled the gaps in his own timeline in an ambitious documentary called Oliver Stone&#8217;s <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/oliver-stones-history-lesson\/\">&#8230; >><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[93,28,61],"tags":[14,253,22,29,86],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/836"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=836"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/836\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1794,"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/836\/revisions\/1794"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=836"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=836"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=836"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}