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 “A Twice-Told
Tale” – because the narrative he presents was told first by
official Soviet “historians” 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 “every Communist front group on the West Coast,”
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 “isolationists,” anti-war
activists who were smeared
by the Communists and the fellow-traveling media as Nazi “fifth
columnists.”

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 “Republic,” 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 “progressive policies”
and “tight regulation of business” – 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 “appeasement” 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
“relocation” 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 “reluctant”
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 “isolationism”
– 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 “revisionists.”

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 “make the world safe for democracy.” An examination of
that seminal tragedy would have required a good look at Wilson,
one of the plaster saints of American “progressivism,” 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 “good war,” 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
“good war,” so Obama’s wars are considered equally righteous. Obama
was elected, with their enthusiastic support, on a promise to fight
the Afghan war – the “good war” – and be done with
Bush’s half-measures. The Libyan intervention was treated by the
liberal media
as yet another “good war,” 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 “revolutionaries,” 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 “good” war against the Iranian Hitler.

Read
the rest of the article

November
29, 2012

Justin
Raimondo [send him mail]
is editorial director of Antiwar.com
and is the author of An
Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard and Reclaiming
the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement.

Copyright
© 2012 Antiwar.com

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