by Justin Raimondo Antiwar.com
Recently by Justin Raimondo: Obama as Wilson: Playing the Historical Analogy Game
I wanted to like Oliver Stone's new documentary, The Untold History of the United States, really I did. After all, here is the maker of films positing a conspiracy to assassinate John F. Kennedy and exposing the criminal history of the Vietnam war promising to unveil the suppressed truth about America's role in the world. With the Usual Suspects attacking Stone before the first part of this Showtime series was ever released, I was eagerly looking forward to a scathing critique of the American empire's long bloody rampage through the history of modern times.
I should have known better.
Stone, is turns out, has been engaged in some false advertising. For what he has produced, at least so far, might be better entitled u201CA Twice-Told Taleu201D – because the narrative he presents was told first by official Soviet u201Chistoriansu201D and their fellow-travelers in this country, albeit without the hi-tech enhancements and prominent platform available to Stone. And if you think this is just cheap red-baiting, then go on over to Digby's site and watch chapter one.
Our story starts out with the development of the atomic bomb, and what Stone regards as the unlikely engagement of Robert Oppenheimer, a brilliant scientist and fellow-traveling leftist, with the high mucka-mucks of the Pentagon. The US government, it seems, paid little attention to the military potential of nuclear research until Albert Einstein wrote a letter to FDR lobbying for a US government crash program to weaponize the atom.
Curiously, the decision to actually drop the bomb is not mentioned – perhaps he's leaving that for the second part – and the narrative soon veers off into the history of the 1930s and the run-up to World War II. It is here that Stone's embarrassing pro-Soviet viewpoint comes across like a very bad smell.
What Stone fails to point out is that Oppenheimer, who belonged – as Stone notes – to u201Cevery Communist front group on the West Coast,u201D had ideological reasons for letting the atomic genie out of its bottle. American Communists opposed US entry into World War II right up until the announcement of the Hitler-Stalin Pact – and then turned on a dime, becoming the most militantly vociferous advocates of entering the war. They led the effort to squelch labor strikes in wartime, and called for jailing the hated u201Cisolationists,u201D anti-war activists who were smeared by the Communists and the fellow-traveling media as Nazi u201Cfifth columnists.u201D
Stone cites Oppenheimer's evocation of the devilish Hindu goddess Kali, deity of destruction and war, as the great scientist contemplates the awesome power he's unleashed on the world: it never occurs to him that Oppenheimer doubtless considered Kali to be, in this instance, on the side of the angels, i.e. the Kremlin, which was at that moment fighting for its life against the German onslaught.
According to Stone, the problem with US entry into World War II is that it didn't happen soon enough. We should have gone to war with Germany and Italy in defense of the Spanish u201CRepublic,u201D when the Communists toppled the Spanish monarchy and established a nascent Soviet satellite on the Iberian peninsula. The Spanish commies, we are told, had incurred the wrath of Corporate America by their u201Cprogressive policiesu201D and u201Ctight regulation of businessu201D – a vapid euphemism for the forced collectivization of all business, the wholesale murder of Catholic priests and nuns, and a reign of Red Terror that rivaled that being carried out in Stone's beloved Soviet Union.
The myth of Munich and Western u201Cappeasementu201D of Hitler is uncritically reiterated: Stone bewails the fact that the Western powers, particularly France, did nothing when Hitler's army marched into the Rhineland. It never occurs to him to ask: why was the Rhineland, overwhelmingly German, subjected to a de facto occupation in the first place? The Treaty of Versailles, which laid the groundwork for German revanchism, does not get even a single mention. Stone, the supposed iconoclast, isn't about to take on the myth of German war guilt. In its revision of the conventional historical wisdom, the left-wing of the War Party draws the line when it comes to the two world wars.
The two heroes of this chapter in Stone's epic are, in hagiographic order, Josef Stalin and FDR: the latter earns high praise not only for the New Deal but also because he waged a clandestine war well before Pearl Harbor, and the former is hailed as the indomitable leader of a heroic people's war against fascism, who may have had some flaws – such as a bloodthirsty ruthlessness – although, to be sure, they were flaws that ultimately enabled him to lead his nation to victory.
As Stone would have it, the Soviet Union defeated the Nazis and won World War II for the Allies almost single-handedly: he blandly describes the u201Crelocationu201D of tens of millions of Soviet citizens as a necessary measure to preserve Russian industry, and his paean to the Kremlin's forced industrialization program, which enslaved the entire population of the USSR still under the Red Army's boot, sounds like something out of the Daily Worker, circa 1935. He does mention the Lend-Lease program, which, he notes with some rancor, was passed by a u201Creluctantu201D Congress: it was this – America's industrial might, untouched by the war – and not the Stakhanovite fantasies of Soviet propagandists, that enabled the Russians to hold out against the German onslaught.
While Stone shows footage of Americans saying they didn't want to get dragged into another European war, this viewpoint is implicitly attributed to nothing more substantial than a stubborn u201Cisolationismu201D – and, rather more explicitly, vicious hostility to the Soviet Union. Stone cites, with clear disapproval, none other than Harry Truman wishing aloud that the Nazis and Soviets would kill each other off. I didn't know Truman ever said that, but such sentiment was even more clearly expressed by such conservative opponents of FDR as Col. Robert R. McCormick, publisher of the Chicago Tribune, and other conservative anti-interventionists. They are left out of this phony Untold History, along with the story of the biggest and most militant antiwar movement in American history, the America First Committee, which opposed FDR's drive to war right up until Pearl Harbor. This history remains largely untold and unknown (although I've made a modest effort to tell it) – and, if the historical reality is ever uncovered and popularized, it likely won't be due to the efforts of Stone and similar pro-Soviet u201Crevisionists.u201D
Stone chose to begin his narrative with the run-up to World War II, and this allows him to side-step the real genesis of that horrific conflict: World War I, the Versailles Treaty, and the ruinous Allied and American role in ensuring the rise of a revanchist Germany. For the Great Anti-Fascist Struggle of Stone's sectarian imagination was really the second act of Woodrow Wilson's war to u201Cmake the world safe for democracy.u201D An examination of that seminal tragedy would have required a good look at Wilson, one of the plaster saints of American u201Cprogressivism,u201D and that would have meant a great deal more evasion of unpleasant historical facts than even Stone is capable of.
Yet he doesn't do a bad job of evasion in the present work: in Oliver Stone's vision of America during World War II, tens of thousands of Japanese-Americans and others were never rounded up and thrown into concentration camps. Of this historic crime, there is nary a word. However, he does mention, surprisingly, that the Americans knew a Japanese attack was coming, although, according to him, they expected it in the Philippines rather than Hawaii. I guess the work of Robert Stinnett, and others, who have shown the Americans had deciphered the Japanese secret code and successfully intercepted their war plans, isn't available at the Hollywood public library.
Stone's Untold History is emblematic of the problem with much of the ostensibly anti-interventionist left in America and around the world: the second world war is their big blind spot. Because they are burdened with upholding the mythology of the u201Cgood war,u201D they break ranks and run whenever the War Party holds up another reincarnation of Hitler and demands his righteous destruction. The neocons, for whom it is always 1939, know how to appeal to the left: just conjure the ghost of Munich, and with it the screaming lunacy of the failed painter from Vienna, and you will have the liberals, as well as the reflexively militarist conservatives, in the palm of your hand.
This is why limousine liberals of Stone's sort have deserted the antiwar movement in droves: just as Roosevelt's war was the u201Cgood war,u201D so Obama's wars are considered equally righteous. Obama was elected, with their enthusiastic support, on a promise to fight the Afghan war – the u201Cgood waru201D – and be done with Bush's half-measures. The Libyan intervention was treated by the liberal media as yet another u201Cgood war,u201D the 21st century equivalent of the Spanish Civil War recalled by Stone with such partisan passion. And the same crowd is even now agitating for direct US military support to the Syrian u201Crevolutionaries,u201D whose terrorist allies and leaders are apparently today's version of the heroic Spanish Republicans. Gadhafi and Assad are the new Hitlers, albeit of the tinpot variety, whose overthrow is to be followed by yet another u201Cgoodu201D war against the Iranian Hitler.
