How Do You Put Murderous Dictators in Context? Let’s Ask Oliver Stone!
by Pam MeisterLeave it to Oliver Stone to come up with the idea of a miniseries to put the likes of Stalin and Hitler “in context.” Oh, and for good measure, let’s toss in Joe McCarthy, whose mission was to expose Communists in the U.S. government.
What makes him a natural for this kind of project is Stone’s admiration for Fidel Castro – his documentary about the Cuban dictator (shelved by HBO – kudos to them) attempted to “portray the human figure” – and Hugo Chavez (whom he “warmly embraced” when on some kind of fact-finding tour of Latin America).
Do they share a wardrobe?
What is it with Hollywoodites and dictators? Michael Medved tries to explain:
“Many people in the entertainment industry feel guilty about their own wealth. They know that they earned it in an arbitrary way, not because they are so much better than someone who’s still working as a waiter in Beverly Hills, but they earned it out of luck. They believe that all capitalism works that way – that people have goodies showered on them not because of their own hard work or creativity, but because of good fortune and luck. That guilt produces this fascination with socialism.”
Feeling guilty, guys? Why not give that excess money to a worthy charity? Or you could decline the big-buck paychecks and ask for something a little more in keeping with what, say, someone working at a convenience store would earn. But I digress.
Stone’s upcoming 10-part miniseries for Showtime, called “Secret History of America”…
…promises to focus on events that ‘at the time went under-reported, but crucially shaped America’s unique and complex history of the last 60 years.’ Subjects in ‘History’ include President Harry Truman’s decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan and the origins of the Cold War with the Soviet Union.
Of the monsters Stalin and Hitler (and McCarthy!), Stone said,
“Stalin, Hitler, Mao, McCarthy — these people have been vilified pretty thoroughly by history,” Stone told reporters at the Television Critics Association’s semi-annual press tour in Pasadena.
“Stalin has a complete other story,” Stone said. “Not to paint him as a hero, but to tell a more factual representation. He fought the German war machine more than any single person. We can’t judge people as only ‘bad’ or ‘good.’ Hitler is an easy scapegoat throughout history and its been used cheaply. He’s the product of a series of actions. It’s cause and effect … People in America don’t know the connection between WWI and WWII … I’ve been able to walk in Stalin’s shoes and Hitler’s shoes to understand their point of view. We’re going to educate our minds and liberalize them and broaden them. We want to move beyond opinions … Go into the funding of the Nazi party. How many American corporations were involved, from GM through IBM. Hitler is just a man who could have easily been assassinated.”
Um, I am familiar with the connection between WWI and WWII. Bitter because they lost, bitter because they lost a lot of land, and bitter because they were ordered to pay billions in reparations that took a heavy toll on their economy (they could not afford to pay it all), Germans were ripe for exploitation, and Hitler was the “right man” at the “right time.” Not everyone in America is as in awe of your intellect as you are, Oliver.
I suppose we should have a pity party for Hitler. His dad was abusive, he didn’t do well in school due to his innate laziness, didn’t have lots of friends and he was rejected from art school. He also wasn’t very attractive and had a problem with flatulence, poor guy. Then again, there are plenty of ugly, gassy people whose relationship with their parents wasn’t the greatest who didn’t get into the school of their choice, but not everyone makes up for past failures by coming up with the “Final Solution,” killing six million Jews and other “undesirables,” and inciting a war that involved most of the world’s nations in one way or another and ended with over 70 million dead.
Couldn’t he have just gone on Oprah or Dr. Phil instead?
Some of Hitler’s handiwork
Will Joe Kennedy, patriarch of the “Kennedy Dynasty,” be included in the miniseries as a man who welcomed Hitler because he was a “welcome solution” to the problem of those pesky Jews? Just curious.
We could feel sorry for Stalin too. Imagine being saddled with the birth name Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili! Geez, how do you even say that? But Hollywood stars are in the habit of changing their names too, so maybe that’s one way they can relate. Stalin’s father was a cobbler (shoemaker) and an alcoholic, his mother was a maid, he contracted smallpox and he suffered from the same kind of poverty that most Russian peasants did in the late 1800s and early 1900s. (He earned better grades than Hitler did, though. Snap! Sounds pretty depressing.
But it’s not every pockmarked Russian peasant who can claim to have not only been a part of the group who toppled a royal dynasty, but also engineered a famine in Ukraine that killed some 7 million people because they dared to seek independence from his glorious rule. Gosh, who wouldn’t revel in the government seizure of all privately-owned land and livestock in a predominantly agricultural society?
Victims of Stalin’s famine in Ukraine
And speaking of “context,” had we not dropped the bomb on Japan, the Japanese would have kept on fighting, keeping the war going on for who knows how much longer, until “all Japanese were killed.” And now we’re allies. Who would have predicted that in 1945? The world is a strange and wondrous place.
But fear not, patriotic Americans: Big Hollywood’s Kurt Schlichter has Oliver Stone’s number:
The real “Secret History” that Stone won’t disclose involves the identity of the Americans who actually thought the Nazis had quite a lot to offer with their collectivist, anti-capitalist vision, their refusal to let things like democracy stop their agenda, and their fondness for eugenics. Here’s a hint: It starts with a “P” and ends with a “rogressives.”
Hmmm…you mean that Sen. Joe McCarthy was right all along?
I wonder if that’s the kind of context Stone is looking for?
Somehow, I doubt it.
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71 Comments
you know HBO might be on to something. Hire the loony to make his "films" and them never release them.
If you had the kind of money necessary to do that, who would you put on exclusive contract?
There are times I wish God would hold Judgment Day now, but alas….I am not the Almighty.
Oliver Stone should be grateful!
Oliver Stone is mentally unbalanced.
I'm just glad that guys like Oliver Stone are out there to enlighten the rest of us poor saps with our knee-jerk, unthinking reactions to mass murderers who establish tyrannical regimes and start horrendous wars as being "evil." Oh please teach us Lord Oliver, oh please oh please oh pleeeeassssseeeeeee……….
We're not supposed to put murderous dictators in context.
We're supposed to put them in the ground.
Let's see a REAL history on the Progressive movement on the History Channel. Might redeem them a little.
Only in Hollyweird – Where fools like Stone try to make poop look human.
… or try to pick it up by the "clean end"!
Stone and his ilk are trying to re-write history to favor their socialist views. The truly sad part of all of this is the "Progressives" will be teaching future generations that Bush was just as bad if not worse than Hitler, Stalin and Mao. I consider myself fortunate to have had honest, hardworking military parents who taught me right from wrong.
"We can’t judge people as only ‘bad’ or ‘good.’ Hitler is an easy scapegoat throughout history and its been used cheaply. He’s the product of a series of actions. " – Oliver Stone
This statement sums up the leftist mindset. Moral relativism. Victimhood mentality.
"He (Stalin) fought the German war machine more than any single person."
This statement alone makes Stone unqualified for anything more taxing than operating a pooper-scooper. Ask the Soviet troop who had to go into battle UNARMED and pick up the rifle of the guy who fell next to him about Stalin's fighting prowess.
Here's the lovely man profiled in an American magazine. It gives me chills to think that someone so evil could be so affectionately written about. But it was and is the MSM, after all:
“His (Stalin’s) household and his office are run quietly and efficiently, taking into account his pet likes and dislikes. He likes chess, skittles, movies, and piano music. In his youth he liked to ride and shoot, but he hasn’t done either for years. His artistic tastes are simple, almost conventional…When he expresses displeasure with some creative work, however, it does not always mean that the offending artists are liquidated.” (Richard E. Lauterbach, “Stalin at 65,” Life, 1 January 1945)
So, would there have been a WWII if the US had stayed out of WWI?
Can you believe this????
Saul Alinsky had nice things to say about Lucifer, too.
Yes we can!
Here – I'll put Oliver Stone "in context"
"Out of touch liberal kook."
Gee, that was easy!
All this rot they're heaving at us, and yet they don't have the, er … backbone, to release "The Path to 9/11" on DVD.
True. Stalin was an unhinged sociopathic KILLER…he was a street thug – robbing banks in the early days and bashed his way up the ranks…as Lenin lay on his death bed he warned the party about Stalin's crazy killer mentality.
Ooh, yeah, sorry – wrong narrative…
Can I get an AMEN!
Here, here! They can take Jonah Goldberg's book and turn it into a nice documentary (like they tried to do with Zinn's stupid book).
The Russians survived the German invasion despite Stalin. The Soviet leader who had signed a non-aggression pact with Hitler in1939 was in awe of the Nazi leader and despite scores of warnings from reliable sources – even sources inside Germany – he refused to prepare his country against an attack. He even imprisoned or executed people who dared to warn of the coming invasion. Read Harrison Salsbury's The Siege of Leningrad (among many others) to understand Stalin's lack of responsibility. 20 million citizens of the USSR died in the war and when prisoners of war returned after 1945 he had them sent to Gulags because they had "failed" as soldiers and had been captured by the enemy. I hope Stone puts this "in context" in his mini-series.
Amen!
Actually, it is believed by some that his son committed suicide.
Stalin had two sons. The second son was given high rank in the Soviet Air Force and was a horendous drunk. I'm certain you have the two mixed up. The first son was bit older but was accepted and taken in by Stalin's second wife, but he was a mental health mess too, due mostly to his tryrant father. Check it out, I'm shooting from memory.
He was also so stunned that the Germans "ignored" their pact and that Hitler screwed him he was basically paralysed and did nothing until urged into action by Gen. G. Zhukov
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I wrote Showtime to advise I would cancel. Got a note back from them saying that new information re: Hitler & Stalin has been uncovered and I should watch for myself with an open mind.
I wrote them back to say that there were 6,000,000 Jews not available for rebuttal and that was all I need.
Bye-bye Showtime. I canceled them.
BTW, is Showtime aware that Oliver Stone has an extensive history of drug abuse, arrests and court ordered rehab?
Amen! Kill em all and let God sort em out!
Oh my!
Showtime exec have the same or they wouldn't have this scum on Showtime!
The only moral relativisum that I buy into is that greasing Marxists isn't murder.
McCarthy was right all along? You are a twit, albeit a twit who parrots what she reads in Ann Coulter's books.
Another little considered cause for WWII is that the only European country that was NOT invaded by a foreign army was… Germany. It was real easy for Germans to believe that they hadn't "really" lost the war. The German army stepped back and "let" the civilian government sign the peace treaty with the winners. And all that stuff about how harsh the winners were with Germany? That evil Versailles Treaty? Well, when Germany won over the French in the Franco Prussian war, the French suffered much worse under war reparations. And, of course, there was the widespread devestation suffered in WWI by Belgium and France, by occupying German Armies.
Do Oliver Stone's movies make money. anyway?
another vagrant thought: how much Middle Eastern oil money has been invested in Showtime? This is not a silly question.
Yes, if for no other reason than because the Japanese and the Soviets were already becoming regional threats.
http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2009/07/17/de...
Not quoting Ann Coulter.
The sad part about this is you will see this, primarily, in wealthy suburban neighborhoods and of course LA, NY and Chicago school systems.
Actually, this is what our TENURED HIPPIE profs teach in most universities so not a big deal.
"new information re: Hitler & Stalin has been uncovered"
By whom? Why hasn't it appeared in a scholarly journal, or even in the news media? I expect Ston'es "new information" came fro the same sources who told him who killed JFK….
In fact, I reckon it'll be the same people.
McCarthy was right all along; in fact we didn't have an inkling how horrifyingly right he was until the KGB archives were opened post-'91.
But of course you've been spoon-fed the meme that McCarthy was a demon from hell. Clue up, man: the Rosenbergs and Hiss were the bad guys. Very, very bad guys.
Maybe Stone should be magically sent to a concentration camp like in the Twilight Zone and see if he still wants to empathize with Hitler rather than his Jewish victims. I doubt it.
I cannot speak for anyone else, but no, I am a twit who parrots what he reads in the Soviet archives (that we have access to).
And you are just an idiot.
Yes, that's it; Hitler and Stalin were just misunderstood.
What a boob.
naaa – stone is just your garden variety ……….liberal America hater working to improve on the obozo brand of America bashing
the dictators count on the obozo sycophants to defend them and rewrite history
its what obozo is counting on to cover his total incompetence and corruption
dont forget…………….. obozo sycophant working the LIBERAL VITRIOL AND HATE toward America
stone is trying to cover the obozo incompetence by diverting attention to other idiots of history
Probably.
It does make you wonder, though – if the US hadn't provided the final boost of manpower that finished off Germany, would the Europeans eventually have fought themselves to a standstill and opted to end the war by treaty? Would that have spared Germany the humiliating defeat, harsh surrender terms and punitive reparations that supposedly motivated Hitler?
Not our fault, though – the Allies were begging us to help and we held off for a long time. We finally gave them what they wanted.
In short, any peace treaty at this point in time without the utter destruction of the German military and its subsidiaries (namely the crippled but intact Austro-Hungarian war machine) as a capable fighting force (like what historically happened due to the 1918 campaigns) would have favored Germany over the West, as what Germany had to yield in the West (provided, of course, it even yielded the majority of that) was a pittance compared to its conquests in the East. Any result like this would have almost certainly seen the same militarists in Berlin responsible for WWI start WWII after a couple of decades to allow them to recover from the demographic damage of WWI and to advance the Germanization of Eastern Europe to a point were it would be all but impossible to eject them. And while this WWII would have probably been far less atrocious than the one Hitler historically waged, but the prospects for victory (even to the extent that our bittersweet triumph in 1945 was victory) would have been even slimmer than historically.
And it must be finally noted that Versailles is often just a convenient scapegoat to excuse the interbellum events in Germany when in fact it had more to do with the wild power struggle that accompanied the collapse of the traditional imperial order and the decision of the warlords on the OHL to pass the buck for Germany's defeat onto the emerging Weimar government. Versailles did not so much motivate Hitler as it gave him a cause celebre and gave him an instant soapbox.
So, do not assume that a failure to defeat Germany in WWI would have been any better. Our failing was not in defeating German,y but in failing to capitalize on that victory to prevent Germany from ever re-emerging as a threat again.
Pam Meister, here's one little fact that many people did not know about Stalin: as a young man in his teens, he studied to become a priest. Eventually, he fell by the wayside by the name of Karl Marx (he read books that were banned by the governmnet) and got involved in some thuggish banditry and revolution in his homeland and in Russia.
"He (Stalin) fought the German war machine more than any single person."
Maybe. Of course, it would be equally fair to say that he also helped the German war machine more than any single person.
[...] Read the whole thing at Big Hollywood. [...]
This is hard to say. If you accept the premise that the main cause of World War II was the mismatch between the settlement terms at Versailles and the actual power of the European states, then it might have taken much longer for a second war to start.
There is also a fair argument to be made that World Wars I and II could both have been avoided by better statesmanship by the Germans, and the French and British, respectively.
Even the most pitiful student of history KNOWS that McCarthy was correct in his accusations, every single one. Hell – he was fed his information from the FBI. The Russian Venona papers are clearly an idictment against everyone who he accused.
It's the pathetic ideologue who is afraid of losing their one tired inaccurate polysyllabic adjective from their vastly monosyllabic bumper sticker vocabulary that disagree with the winds of truth.
"He who controls the present, controls the past. He who controls the past, controls the future." — George Orwell
I don't think anything more about the Stone/Obama obamanation of history needs to be said.
It's an idiotic statement. What's true ( as far as I know) is that the Soviet Union lost more soldiers and civilians, sacrificed more lives and property, and produced more of certain types of weapons than any of the other allied countries did. How Stone went from that to "Stalin did more against Hitler," I do now know.
It could be true in the sense that Stalin was a dictator and dictators at the height of their power do have the ability to get things done. Unfortunately, they usually get things done in nasty ways unavailable to their democratically-elected counterparts.
Seriously, Stone sounds like he's babbling. It was an interview – he was speaking off the cuff. Maybe coherent impromptu speaking is just not his thing.
Good answer. Thanks!
In Solzhenitsyn's novel, Ivan Denisovich was sent to the gulag for that very reason. His unit got isolated behind German lines, they got captured, they escaped back to Soviet lines – and were arrested as traitors.
I wonder if Stone's ever read Solzhenitsyn…
I think people get confused about McCarthy being right and the actions he (and other leaders) took based on their being right. Plenty of commies around – but was it right to hound them for it, bring them up on charges, refuse to hire them, punish them for…yes, I'll say it…their dissent?
Probably not, is my opinion. I think exposing them to public scrutiny would have been enough – lots of newspaper articles, editorials, etc. Shame them not for their exercising free speech and association, but for the *content* of their speech and the (Soviet) *nature* of their associations.
As it was, the McCarthy and the government played right into their hands by acting like bullies. Bad move, politically. Eventually, people who otherwise agreed with them had to object to their methods. Could have been handled better.
He should be irrelevant – but he's a millionaire Hollywood insider with some famous films under his belt.
That clearly doesn't mean he's an idiot.
The Soviets always felt (perhaps rightly) that they were doing the heavly lifting and the U.S. and Britian weren't gearing up quickly enough. Hitler did throw about 3 million soldiers at the Soviets and they Germans were smacking them around until, tah dah- the Russian winter became the Soviet Ally just like against Napolean. Incidently – Hitler began his Soviet campaign the SAME DAY that Napaleon did – apparently an ironic fact lost on Hitler – but not on his General staff.
No wonder the sane ones wanted to kill him.
That's weird. Makes you wonder what kind of priest he would have made.
Yeah, I don't know about you but I'm a complete idiot. The Man has given me a false consciousness and hypnotized me with propaganda. Big Business keeps me complacent by providing me with abundant consumer goods. I'm just a sheep who just does what he's told to do and thinks what he's told to think. I don't have an original thought in my entire brain. All my ideas were put there by somebody else. It's a bummer, man.
Lucky I've got vanguards of the Movement like Oliver Stone to teach me to Question Authority and Speak Truth to Power. He's like totally expanded my mind. Right on, man!
It would be interesting to see how the movement evolved from Teddy Roosevelt's trust-busters into the current bunch of out-and-out socialists.
Everything Stone says in that sentence is absolutely true – the problem is, none of it is new or exciting or ground-breaking. Yes, it's simplistic to just judge people as "bad" or "good" without understanding how they got that way. Yes, Hitler was the product – as we all are – of all the stuff that happened to him in his life. And yes, he's been used as a scapegoat throughout history – mostly by leftists who use him to scapegoat conservatives. All true. And yet Stone seems to think he's onto something brilliant – something that's going to change how we think for all time. That 60+ years of WWII scholarship have yielded only lies or misunderstanding. It's just hard to understand why he thinks that. A guy so into history shouldn't be that ignorant.
You're right, they shouldn't have been treated that way, they should have been publicly executed for treason and espionage. Bullies? The govenment acted like PUSSY's while democracies fell and innocent civilians were slaughtered in the dead of night – disappeared by the kgb or held up in mock show trials and exectued for the sin of being in the way. In China entire villages and towns were plowed under along with the inhabitants while Russian tanks rolled over Hungary and Checkoslovakia and eastern Germany sank into a moral morass that Hitler would have loved while these vile creatures undermined the US Government and prevented us from raising a finger.
Had they been executed for treason or deported wholesale to the death camps they helped create maybe we wouldn't have these freaking morons; Pelosi, Reid, Obama, attempting to destroy the constitution that brave men like Joseph McCarthy strove to protect.
I think this will rank right up there with the stunning revelations presented in "Alien Autopsy…"
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