Oliver Stone hasn't made a good movie in fifteen years, so it's not surprising he's desperate for attention. He has an upcoming documentary series in which he condescends to tell us about "the secret history of America," in which he posits his feverishly-paranoid, conspiracy-tinged worldview as an objective truth that has incredibly eluded trained historians.
It's not surprising that the thrust of Stone's documentary appears to be regurgitated Howard Zinn: that American history is an easily-decoded series of evils perpetrated by corporate America and the political elite on lower classes and other countries.
More disgusting than that is his comments on the likes of Hitler and Stalin, pretty much the only two people you'll get 95% of people to agree are evil.
"You cannot approach history unless you have empathy for the person youmay hate," Stone said during the show's trailer, which promised to put historical villains "in context."
Stone apparently knows nothing about how historians actually operate. The whole idea behind writing history is "putting things in context." You haven't stumbled across some mind-blowing secret, Oliver.
Of course, there's the question of what context he wishes to put them in, but we'll return to that.
Stone's comments regarding Hitler, the Holocaust and the "Jewish-controlled media" have drawn the most attention, earning the ire of people both left and right. I have little to say about this: it fits in perfectly with his plethora of other paranoid ramblings about corporate America and what he calls in Nixon "The Beast."
Stone tells us that:
"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."
You're right! The thousands of books on World War II and the Third Reich make no effort to explore the context of Hitler, why he came to power, why he launched the most destructive war in history and the world's largest genocide.
"He's not saying we're going to come out with a more positive view of Hitler," emphasized professor Peter Kuznick, the lead writer on the project. "But we're going to describe him as a historical phenomenon and not just somebody who appeared out of nowhere."
And who is this revelation going to startle? Certainly not William Shirer, Richard J. Evans, Ian Kershaw, Martin Gilbert, Allan Bullock, Joachim Fest and the many other reputable historians of the Second World War. Heck, anyone who's read a fair amount of Nazi and WWII-related literature is unlikely to find this shocking.
This is rank condescension. Nazi Germany is probably the most written-about phenomenon of the 20th Century, analyzed from pretty much all angles possible and scrutinized to death. That doesn't mean, of course a fresh perspective of it can't be found, but it is rather obnoxious, boneheaded and self-serving to claim that you are the first to look at the Nazis "in context." What else have historians been doing for the past seventy years?
Of course, Stone shows where his true interests lie with this JFK-flavored commentary on Barack Obama:
Stone also warned that the same military industrial complex forces that he's explored in movies such as "JFK" and in "Secret History," are now corrupting Barack Obama.
"You can understand why Obama is following in Bush's footsteps in Afghanistan," Stone said."Obama is very much trapped, we believe, in that system. And so that's what we're going to try and show you — the way it works."
More directly, consider:
We want to move beyond opinions … Go into the funding of the Nazi party. How many American corporations were involved, from GM through IBM.
So putting Hitler and Stalin "in context" means putting them in the context of a worldview that reflexively blames America for everything bad that has ever happened.
There is a grain of truth to this observation, but it's a gross, ideologically-driven oversimplification. It ignores the political and economic situation within Germany which enabled Hitler's rise to power, and effectively absolves Hitler of blame for his actions, not unlike Pat Buchanan. It's "The Beast," the American bogeyman, and perhaps even those pesky Jews who put Hitler in power, amirite?
"Hitler is just a man who could have easily been assassinated."
What an ingenious observation. Someone ought to make a movie about that subject.
I'm not even sure what this means, anyway. "Just a man"? In the strictest definition, yes, but most men do not rise to control of a large nation-state and wage a genocidal war. "Could easily have been assassinated"? So could anyone.
It's not only Hitler who Stone feels gets an unfairly bad rap, but (less surprisingly) Joseph Stalin, who Stone calls
the man who “fought the German war machine” and hence as an individual who cannot be judged as “only ‘bad’ or ‘good.’”
Of course Stalin fought the Nazis, albeit after signing an alliance with Hitler and carving up Poland and Eastern Europe with him. Unless you're Luxembourg, that's what you do when a foreign army invades your country. He also instituted a horrendously tyrannical regime that ruthlessly slaughtered political dissidents, crushed all dissent, assassinated opponents perceived and real, subjugated Eastern Europe to Communist rule, and generally served the interests of Joseph Stalin.
His current apologists in Russia notwithstanding, it's hard to see how anyone could view Stalin in a good light.
Parenthetically, he also seems to claim that "Truman's decision to drop the Atomic bomb" is an "overlooked" part of American history, too - ignoring the ongoing, quite intense debate over its justification and righteousness among historians. But this is simple idiocy, not horribly offensive in and of itself.
Stone's comments don't compare favorably to right-wing nutjobs either. His comments about putting Hitler "in context" seem uncomfortably close to David Irving's coda to Hitler's War, in which he promises
to clean away the "years of grime and discoloration from the facade of a silent and forbidding monument" to reveal the real Hitler
Not to mention Pat Buchanan's recent book which blamed Churchill and Great Britain for the war and the Holocaust, more or less absolving Hitler of guilt - a book that I found myself dissecting in excrutiating depth for a class project.
Funny how the extremes converge on issues like this.
I'll make one final point before moving on:
Stone may have something resembling a point that the popular discouse of history, as opposed to its academic practice, is fairly simplified. Not everyone is a historian or even a history buff; pervasive, one-dimensional views of events and people exist anywhere someone doesn't care to look further into an issue.
The conclusion, however, is not that Hitler and Stalin have been unfairly portrayed; it is no fault of historians that Hitler and Stalin are demonized. These men were as close to objective evil as is possible. "Putting them in context" is what every historian seeks to do. Their approach may be flawed, faulty or biased, but this is a flaw inherent in human beings. Context can help explain why something happens, but it does not change essential facts. And taking things out of one context and putting them in another (as Stone is hinting he's done) is something else entirely.
And, dare I suggest, Stone is about the last person to lecture any historians on bias, honesty or "putting things in context." I would certainly trust a Richard Evans or Edvard Razinskii over a nutjob film director. And certainly you lose any high-ground by ranting about the "Jewish media."
Stone's films, or at least some of them, are great as historical fiction, but anyone taking them remotely seriously is doing themselves a disservice. And his posturing as an actual, real-life historian, instead of a purveyor of paranoia-charged cinematic phantasmagorias, is insulting.
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