<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<rss version="2.0"
	xmlns:content="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/content/"
	xmlns:wfw="http://wellformedweb.org/CommentAPI/"
	xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/"
	xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"
	xmlns:sy="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/syndication/"
	xmlns:slash="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/slash/"
	>

<channel>
	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; Larry Schweikart</title>
	<atom:link href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/author/larry-schweikart/feed/" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml" />
	<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com</link>
	<description></description>
	<lastBuildDate>Wed, 31 Dec 2014 07:56:08 +0000</lastBuildDate>
	<language>en-US</language>
		<sy:updatePeriod>hourly</sy:updatePeriod>
		<sy:updateFrequency>1</sy:updateFrequency>
	
	<item>
		<title>9 Phony Martyrs of the Left</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/larry-schweikart/9-phony-martyrs-of-the-left/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=9-phony-martyrs-of-the-left</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/larry-schweikart/9-phony-martyrs-of-the-left/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 18 Feb 2013 04:52:46 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Larry Schweikart]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Che]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Hiss]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Phony Martyrs]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Progressives]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Rosenbergs]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=177873</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The progressive school of falsification.

]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/larry-schweikart/9-phony-martyrs-of-the-left/rose-2/" rel="attachment wp-att-178024"><img class="wp-image-178024 alignleft" title="rose" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/rose-384x350.jpg" alt="" width="307" height="280" /></a>Every religion has its martyrs, and so it is with the American Left. Myths have been built around myriad “wronged&#8221; radicals/communists and endless ink spilled about the injustice of their fate. Indeed, when I looked at more than 15 mainstream U.S. college history textbooks several years ago for my 48 Liberal Lies of American History, almost all of them flatly stated or strongly implied that Sacco and Vanzetti, the Rosenbergs, and Alger Hiss, among others, were prosecuted only for their ideology, not for their crimes. In fact, the leftist hall of shame is filled with culprits who were actually guilty. Below is a list of nine of the most infamous leftist criminals in modern American history and the facts surrounding their cases.</p>
<p><strong>1. The Rosenbergs.</strong></p>
<p>When even a communist dictator tells you that Julius and Ethyl Rosenberg were Soviet spies, you’d think the Left would have to believe him. Nikita Khrushchev, one-time premier of the USSR, said the Rosenbergs “provided very significant help in accelerating the production of our atomic bomb.”</p>
<p>Julius and Ethyl Rosenberg slipped atomic bomb secrets, including the famous schematic of the first bomb’s design, to other Soviet agents and by all accounts took five years off the Russians’  a-bomb project. Yet mainstream textbooks such as Marc C. Carnes and John A. Garraty’s American Destiny insist the Rosenbergs were “not major spies” and “the information they provided was not important.” However, Martin Sobell, a long-time friend of the Rosenbergs and co-defendant at their trial, finally admitted that both he and Julius were Soviet agents. One of the Rosenberg sons, Michael Meerpol, who had also maintained his parents’ innocence, simply stated, “I have no reason to doubt Marty.”</p>
<p><strong>2. The McNamara Brothers.</strong></p>
<p>No, this isn’t a movie about Irish thugs, but rather the true story of John (“J. J.”) and James (“J. B.”) McNamara, two union members who bombed the Los Angeles Times building in 1911, killing 21 innocent newspaper employees and injuring over 100 more. Both were found guilty, and James admitted setting the bomb, for which he got life in prison. His accomplice, John, served 15 years in prison and went back to being a union organizer. Some people never learn.</p>
<p>Of course the labor movement saw them as martyrs; a film “A Martyr to His Cause” was made of the bombing, and for a while Labor Day was renamed “McNamara Day.” Another accomplice, Ortie McManigal, the union leader directing the Iron Workers’ bombing campaign—yes, you heard right—ratted out the McNamaras and other union thugs. Clarence Darrow, brought in to defend the pair at the incredible price of $350,000 (nearly $8 million in 2012 bucks) soon had doubts about James’s testimony. Perhaps that was what led him to attempt to bribe a juror, for which the head of the defense team was arrested, even though Darrow was seen passing the bills.</p>
<p>Leftist activist Lincoln Steffens traveled to L.A. to interview the pair, but was convinced also that they were guilty. When Lincoln Steffens and Clarence Darrow conclude you are guilty, it’s a good bet you are.</p>
<p><strong>3. Alger Hiss.</strong></p>
<p>History books make poor Alger into a pathetic figure wrongly put in jail for a minor charge while his accuser, Whitaker Chambers, “wrote a bestseller.” Most textbooks still claim the trial was “controversial.” Alger Hiss was a Soviet spy, period, and was only caught when his fellow agent, Whitaker Chambers, found a conscience and exposed him.</p>
<p>Hiss had worked at a variety of important State Department positions, and had helped draft the organization of the United Nations. Called before the House Un-American Affairs Committee (HUAC) to answer Chambers’ charges, Hiss claimed he had not known Chambers. Had he stopped there, he would have gotten away scot-free. But he sued Chambers for defamation of character, and in a pair of trials beginning in 1949, new evidence was introduced that led to his conviction for perjury.</p>
<p>In high irony, Hiss’s “Woodstock” typewriter—brought in by the defense to prove his innocence—in fact was shown by tests to have been used to type the documents passed to the Russians. At that point, the defense tried to claim that the very documents in question were forgeries, after having laid the groundwork to prove the typewriter produced them. Later, the Venona documents, which were KGB files leaked to the West, mentioned an American spy named ALES, who was one of only four Americans at Yalta to return home via Moscow, and the only one fitting the ALES time-and-date requirements was Alger.</p>
<p>Just when everyone thought Alger was bottled up for good, a conference on the Cold War at New York University in 2007 saw a bait-and-switch attempted in which a Nation editor claimed to have evidence that ALES was Wilder Foote (one of the other men) . . . except Foote wasn’t even in Washington when the ALES spy activity was going on. Hiss’s itinerary fit ALES, Foote’s did not.</p>
<p><strong>4. Sacco and Vanzetti.</strong></p>
<p>Astoundingly, textbooks still claim that Sacco and Vanzetti were innocent, that “their trial was a travesty” as American Destiny says, and that “the state doctored evidence” (Making a Nation). The two anarchists, Niccolo Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, had been charged with robbing a shoe factory paymaster and a security guard in South Braintree, Massachusetts, and killing the guard in the process. A Dedham jury needed only three hours to reach a guilty verdict, but according to the Left, they were guilty only of being anarchists. Except:</p>
<p>Nine eyewitnesses identified Sacco as having been at the scene and/or shooting the guard, and four others identified Vanzetti. Several different analyses of the pistol concluded the bullets came from Sacco’s gun. Vanzetti lied throughout the trial about his own pistol, ammunition and his whereabouts on the date in question. Alibi witnesses proved flimsy. Liberals then claimed that the evidence was manipulated by the state.</p>
<p>In 1983, a new book, Postmortem, claimed that the prosecutor tampered with the evidence, but James Starrs, a professor of law and forensic science, discovered that the defense expert had switched the gun barrel, producing the entire controversy. New ballistics tests found that the two spent cartridges at the scene were made by the same machine as the live cartridges for the same gun Sacco had in his pocket when arrested. Experts also concluded that Sacco’s Colt fired the bullet that killed the guard. If that wasn’t enough, Carlo Tresca told writer Max Eastman that Sacco was guilty but not Vanzetti.</p>
<p>In 2005, a 1929 letter from socialist Upton Sinclair, who had defended the two, surfaced in which he had spoken with the two men’s attorney, Fred Moore, who said they were indeed guilty. Moreover, Moore provided details to Sinclair as to how he “framed a set of alibis” for them. All this was too late for former Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis, who in 1977 claimed the two were innocent and said that “all disgrace should be removed from their names.”  Instead, it added disgrace to his.</p>
<p><strong>5. Victims of the Red Scare.</strong></p>
<p>Pick your martyr here: when Senator Joe McCarthy announced on February 9, 1950 that he had a “list of 205 [active members of the Communist party and members of a spy ring] that were made known to the Secretary of State,” it didn’t take long for this to be labeled the “Red Scare.” Just for context’s sake, let’s remember that a) there had already been dozens of Soviet spies exposed in the Roosevelt/Truman administration; b) the West had “lost” China to communism; c) the Soviets had aggressively taken half of Europe and occupied it; d) they had detonated an atomic bomb five years ahead of schedule; and e) they had infiltrated Hollywood. But this was all just “hysteria,” right? (Clue: “hysteria” is an ungrounded fear.)</p>
<p>McCarthy identified several individuals, including Solomon Adler, Frank Coe, Harold Glasser, Owen Lattimore and Annie Lee Moss. McCarthy was not only right that these individuals were Soviet operatives, many of whom played critical roles in denying gold to Chiang Kai-Shek in China, who was locked in a death struggle with communist Mao Tse Tung, but he was too late. By the time he identified most of them, they had done their damage and the administration had quietly removed them. Perhaps one of the most famous of the McCarthy martyrs was Annie Lee Moss. The Left claimed McCarthy had mistaken her for someone else. But M. Stanton Evans’ book, Blacklisted by History, reproduced actual FBI reports identifying Moss as a communist in absolutely unqualified terms. He provided reproductions of other FBI documents totally incriminating virtually all of McCarthy’s so-called victims.</p>
<p><strong>6. The Haymarket Affair.</strong></p>
<p>Long a staple of all left-wing labor history, the Haymarket “Massacre” occurred on May 4, 1886 when workers striking at Haymarket Square in Chicago supposedly gathered peaceably. (Just as an aside, how many peaceful strikers have you seen lately? Can you say SEIU?) Someone hurled a bomb at the police who themselves were standing—peacefully—watching. But after the bomb exploded, they opened fire on the crowd and killed four (seven police were killed and few deny that the crowd fired back at the police).</p>
<p>Rudolf Schnaubelt, the lead suspect, was arrested, but released, then when the police found evidence that showed his role to be more significant, he fled the country. Seven other suspects were indicted as accessories to murder. From the outset the police assumed that anarchists in the labor gathering had planned the event to incite violence. After engaging in a voir dire of almost one thousand potential jurors, the twelve selected confessed to being “prejudiced.” Historians James Henretta and David Brody (America: A Concise History) wrote that the defendants were “victims of one of the great miscarriages of American justice.”</p>
<p>There was one small problem with their “historical” analysis: they had relied on a defense-supplied transcript of the trial rather than the actual trial record itself. This was too much for even an honest liberal like Timothy Messer-Kruse, whose two books on Haymarket came from slogging through the actual trial transcript. He concluded that indeed Schnaubelt was the likely bomb thrower, that the crowd (based on forensic recreations he did) almost certainly fired at the police, and that the defendants received a fair trial by all standards of the day.</p>
<p>Sometimes the truth is so clear that even liberals must confront it—and to be sure, Messer-Kruse paid a price in character assassination by his liberal brethren before, finally, several center-left publications began to admit that his book was, as Choice said, “well-argued” and “careful.” Labor History named Messer-Kruse’s second book on the Haymarket “Massacre,” Trial of the Haymarket Anarchists, as its book of the year.</p>
<p><strong>7. Huey Newton.</strong></p>
<p>David Horowitz’s <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Radical-Son-Generational-David-Horowitz/dp/0684840057/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1360919393&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=radical+son">Radical Son</a> has done a thorough job of exposing the co-founder of the Black Panthers in 1966. Newton, already with an assault with a deadly weapon conviction, was pulled over on October 28, 1967 by Oakland police officer John Frey, who quickly realized he had pulled over the Black Panther leader and called for help. A second policeman, Herbert Heanes, arrived. As the typical non-descript, take-no-offensive-to-the-left position Wikipedia says, “shots were fired.” Frey was shot at a range of less than a foot, four times. Newton was shot once in the abdomen. Newton was convicted of manslaughter, appealed, got two new trials that ended in mistrials, and the state gave up. Newton later told close friends that he had killed Frey, and Horowitz recalled that all the “Panther exiles” knew he had killed Frey. It is noteworthy that while Newton, Angela Davis, and others associated with the Panthers get their own Wikipedia entries, Officer Frey never did.</p>
<p><strong>8. Joe Hill.</strong></p>
<p>Anyone over the age of 40 probably has seen the famous “Woodstock” movie clip of Joan Baez singing “I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill.” Joe Hill, an immigrant who was born Joel Emmanuel Hagglund in Sweden, was typical of the European immigrants of the day who came to the U.S. in 1902 in that he had fully absorbed much of the European socialist dogma. He became a member of the International Workers of the World (“Wobblies”), but generally drifted until he arrived at Park City, Utah near Salt Lake City in 1914. There he killed John G. Morrison and his son during a grocery store robbery, before showing up at a local doctor’s residence with a bullet wound and brandishing a pistol. He claimed he had been shot in a dispute over an unnamed woman, and the doctor reported him. The intruders had worn red bandanas, and police discovered a red bandana in Hill’s room. A dozen witnesses said the killer looked like Hill. While a subsequent biography claims that Hill was “probably” innocent, no actual evidence clearing Hill has ever been produced, and at his trial he did not want to discuss his wound. But hey, at least he gave Joan Baez 15 minutes of fame.</p>
<p><strong>9. Che Guevara.</strong></p>
<p>No, Che isn’t an American, but can anyone think of a leftist martyr who is more honored? After all, even Joe Hill doesn’t have his face on t-shirts. Most of the other creeps listed here don’t have Che’s creds, either: a one-man “death panel,” Che reviewed the murder lists for Fidel Castro’s firing squads, wrote a manual on guerilla warfare, and then broadened his horizons to lead revolutions elsewhere. Bolivian forces killed him in 1967 (of course, “assisted” by the CIA, according to the Left) and that left only Time magazine in 1999 to name him one of the most influential people of the 20<sup>th</sup> century. The Time editors’ elevation of this murderous thug to such a level represents an egregious &#8212; and sadly predictable &#8212; ignorance of <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=2054">historical facts</a>.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p>Sources: Most of the references are found in the end notes for my 48 Liberal Lies About American History, 2<sup>nd</sup> edition (New York: Sentinel, 2007). Also see Humberto Fontova, Exposing the Real Che Guevara: And the Useful Idiots Who Idolize Him (New York: Sentinel, 2008); David Horowitz, Radical Son (New York: Touchstone, 1997) and his Radicals: Portraits of a Destructive Passion (Washington: Regnery, 2012), Timothy Messer-Kruse, The Trial of the Haymarket Anarchists: Terrorism and Justice in the Gilded Age (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), Allen Weinstein, Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case (New York: Random House, 1997), Ronald Radosh and Joyce Milton, The Rosenberg File: Second Edition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), M. Stanton Evans, Blacklisted By History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America’s Enemies (New York: Crown, 2007), and John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999).</p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/larry-schweikart/9-phony-martyrs-of-the-left/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>95</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>A History Lesson for Oliver Stone on Vietnam</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/larry-schweikart/a-history-lesson-for-oliver-stone-on-vietnam/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=a-history-lesson-for-oliver-stone-on-vietnam</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/larry-schweikart/a-history-lesson-for-oliver-stone-on-vietnam/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 24 Jan 2013 04:40:59 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Larry Schweikart]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Oliver Stone]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[President Lyndon Johnson]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[untold history]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Vietnam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[War]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=174314</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The neo-Communist filmmaker doesn't find communist objectives and atrocities worth mentioning. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/larry-schweikart/a-history-lesson-for-oliver-stone-on-vietnam/wp_yankeepapanew003/" rel="attachment wp-att-174355"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-174355" title="wp_yankeepapanew003" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/wp_yankeepapanew003-450x348.jpg" alt="" width="270" height="209" /></a><em>Editor’s note: The following is the seventh installment of a series of articles Frontpage is running in response to Oliver Stone’s neo-Communist documentary series, “The Untold History of the United States.” Frontpage will be reviewing each episode of the Stone series, exposing the leftist hateful lies about America and setting the record straight. Below is a review of Part 7 of the series.</em></p>
<p>In Episode 7 of Showtime&#8217;s <em>Untold History of the United States</em>, “Johnson, Nixon &amp; Vietnam: Reversal of Fortune,” Oliver Stone continues his concocted fantasy of how American history allegedly was with the brave John F. Kennedy set to pull Americans out of Vietnam. Lest we forget last episode, in truth, it was Mr. Kennedy who began with a mere 600 advisors there, then ramped up the troop total to over 14,000—some estimates put it at 25,000. If this is the Left’s definition of “withdrawal,” it’s easy to see why Shawty Lo has 10 Baby Mamas. But I digress.</p>
<p>Lyndon Johnson, according to Stone, disregarded JFK’s “memo” about withdrawing troops and instead escalated. We shall return in a moment to the timeline of the program—which begins with a litany of American/CIA “plots” to destabilize Latin American governments—but it is critical that a clear understanding of what Johnson <em>did</em> vs. what the Joint Chiefs <em>said to him</em> occurs. In a meeting in 1965 with his JCS, Johnson bluntly asked if the U.S. could win the Vietnam war. The Chiefs responded with a qualified “yes”: <em>if</em> the U.S. put in 500,000 ground troops immediately, <em>if</em> the U.S. mined Haiphong harbor and sealed off Soviet and Chinese aid; and <em>if</em> there was round the clock bombing of the north, the U.S. would win.</p>
<p>Keep in mind these were the requirements in 1965, although as late as 1969 the U.S. never reached 500,000 troops (when at least a million troops would have been needed due to the escalation by the North), and there were dozens of “bombing pauses” and “peace offensives,” all useless to the cause of peace. While the military may have lied about enemy body counts and the course of the war later, in 1965 the brass was crystal clear that this was a <em>war</em>, and a major commitment if America wanted to win.</p>
<p>That brings us to Stone’s other contradiction: while Vietnam was not a “declared” war, without realizing it he makes clear that Congress easily would have declared war had it been requested—the vote was unanimous in the House and only two senators voted “no” on the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution.</p>
<p>Stone, however, opens the episode on Vietnam with a review of American intervention in Latin America &#8212; again, supposedly a departure from the JFK’s “reform” efforts, as he labels them. Presumably these Kennedy-esque “reforms” would include the assassination of Ngo Dien Diem (an ally) or the multiple Kennedy-initiated assassination attempts on Fidel Castro. One could argue that at least LBJ managed to target our enemies and was effective enough to remove them. Not once during this harangue about U.S. involvement in the southern hemisphere or the Caribbean are Cuban and Soviet efforts to impose totalitarian gulags on their victims taken seriously. Indeed, throughout the program, if there was a counter-demonstration against a so-called “democratic” Communist government, it was always at the instigation of the CIA and American agents. But if there was a “peace protest” at home, it was never because of KGB agents, who were proven to have been incredibly active throughout the U.S. peace movement. (See the <a href="https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/books-and-monographs/venona-soviet-espionage-and-the-american-response-1939-1957/venona.htm">Venona Project</a> for more information.)</p>
<p>Stone accurately notes (with glee, it seems) that there were atrocities committed by American and/or South Vietnamese troops, although he sloppily shows the “napalm girl,” who was badly burned due to a South Vietnamese attack, while narrating about U.S. atrocities. But this is where the entire series becomes a joke: context. Not once are North Vietnamese or Viet Cong atrocities even mentioned, let alone catalogued—the chopping off of villagers’ arms for supporting the Americans, the genocide of the Hmong, the beheading of village elders who opposed Communists, and so on.</p>
<p>Context aside, Stone perpetuates the same stupid myths in this supposedly “new” and “untold” history. He implies that Vietnam was disproportionately fought by blacks and flatly states that they died in disproportionate numbers. This is absolutely incorrect: blacks comprised 12% of American forces in Vietnam and 12.5% of casualties, which was almost exactly their share of the U.S. population at the time. Indeed, men with a college degree (most of them pilots and the heavy majority of them white) were disproportionately killed. There is the implication, though not specifically stated, that Vietnam was a “draftees’ war,” which again is simply wrong. Contrary to the Stone counterfactual history, two-thirds of Americans who fought in Vietnam were volunteers. When these statistics are connected, it means that in reality the type of person who had the highest likelihood of dying in Vietnam was a white college graduate. An even more astonishing fact is that more Canadians fought in U.S. armed forces in Vietnam than there were Americans who fled to Canada to avoid the draft &#8212; by a factor of three-to-one.</p>
<p>Stone revels in the mass anti-war demonstrations and insists that professors and journalists received CIA money to challenge anti-war views. Of course, to a leftist there can never be an honest disagreement with a leftist policy: it must always come because someone is paid to oppose the Left. Again, we have no mention of the infiltration of campuses by active Soviet sympathizers and devout Communists, which continues to the present.</p>
<p>Throughout, Stone is perfectly willing to believe anything the North Vietnamese say when they are ridiculing or contradicting American claims. But when Gen. Vo Bam later admitted that he was given the task in 1959 of beginning an invasion of the South, somehow the North Vietnamese were not to be believed. Indeed, the testimony by Communist officers is completely relevant and revealing. A 1995 interview with Co. Bui Tin, who served on Ho Chi Minh’s general staff, said, “Gen. [Vo Nguyen] Giap [commander of the North Vietnamese army] believed that guerrilla warfare was important but not sufficient for victory.” Tet, wherein Stone ignores entirely the role of the American media, we now know was a <em>desperation</em> move by the North. Again, Bui Tin:</p>
<blockquote><p>Our senior commander in the South, Gen. Nguyen Chi Thant, knew that we were losing base areas, control of the rural population and that his main forces were being pushed out to the border of South Vietnam . . . .  Tet was designed to influence American public opinion . . . . Our losses were staggering and a complete surprise. Giap later told me that Tet had been a military defeat, though we had gained the planned political advantages.</p></blockquote>
<p>Yet when unnamed North Vietnamese leaders said that the United States would use nuclear weapons in Vietnam, well, that must be a statement of truth for Stone because it’s what he wanted to believe.</p>
<p>American “fear of weakness,” according to Stone, resulted in Vietnam. It couldn’t have anything to do with Communist expansion. In the peace settlement, the South “dithered” about allowing elections, but Stone never mentions that the North never had elections at all.</p>
<p>The post-Vietnam material is equally silly. Stone ignores John Dean’s role in overseeing, and possibly ordering, the Watergate burglaries. But surprisingly Stone spends little time on Watergate because of his obsession with foreign intrigue, this time Chile, where the U.S. was blamed for denying Salvador Allende aid. Yet the contradiction of why a socialist paradise would need outside aid in the first place—especially after stealing foreign assets—is never mentioned. Without doubt, many repressive dictatorial regimes in Latin America killed or “disappeared” (one of Stone’s favorite phrases) tens of thousands of people. Again, context: where is the condemnation of the <em>millions</em> killed in communist purges, or the slaughter of hundreds of thousands by African governments that had nothing whatsoever to do with the United States or the CIA? Stone is so paranoid of the CIA that it must have millions of covert agents to achieve what he credits it with accomplishing, yet at the time of the Iranian takeover of the U.S. embassy in 1979, we could hardly field any agents inside the revolutionary movements.</p>
<p>Continuing through the 1970s and into the 1980s to blame all of America’s woes on Vietnam (this is the “reversal of fortune”), Stone finally drifts into one of the most absurd complaints for a leftist ever: the deficit. He actually laments that Nixon took us off the gold standard (but of course it was Johnson’s Great Society spending, not Vietnam, that destroyed the budgets) and calls a deficit of $258 billion in 1968 “staggering.” FDR and LBJ were pikers in jacking up deficits compared to the current incompetent in the White House, who needs to ponder a trillion-dollar coin as a means to address our shortfalls.</p>
<p>Vietnam did leave a lasting scar, one that was not fully healed until American forces effortlessly kicked Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait. The nation was divided, but this was in no small measure due to the fact that many passionately understood that America&#8217;s cause against Communism was righteous and necessary. Nixon’s narrow election in 1968, for instance, was only “narrow” because George Wallace, even more committed to defeating the North Vietnamese, siphoned off millions of votes from Nixon. Stone’s series is only “untold” because few have had the temerity to portray Soviet propaganda on cable TV as historical fact. If we are lucky, it will continue to be “untold.”</p>
<p><strong>Related articles on Stone’s series:</strong></p>
<p>1. <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/bruce-thornton/oliver-stones-left-wing-agitprop/">Bruce Thornton’s introduction</a> to this Frontpage series.</p>
<p>2. <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/david-horowitz/neo-communism-out-of-the-closet/">David Horowitz’s analysis</a> of the meaning behind the warm reception of Stone’s Kremlin propaganda.</p>
<p>3. <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/matthew-vadum/oliver-stones-untrue-history-stalin-the-great-hero-of-wwii/">Matthew Vadum’s review</a> of Stone’s first episode.</p>
<p>4. Daniel Flynn’s review of “<a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/daniel-flynn/through-oliver-stones-looking-glass/">Roosevelt, Truman and Wallace</a>,” the second episode.</p>
<p>5. Daniel Greenfield’s <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/dgreenfield/the-atom-bomb-and-the-truth-bomb/">review of “The Bomb,”</a> the third episode.</p>
<p>6. Bruce Thornton’s review of “<a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-thornton/oliver-stones-cold-war-melodrama/">The Cold War: 1945-1950</a>,” the 4th episode.</p>
<p>7. Matthew Vadum’s review of “<a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/matthew-vadum/oliver-stones-distortion-of-the-eisenhower-era/">The 50s: Eisenhower, The Bomb &amp; The Third World</a>,” the 5th episode.</p>
<p>8. Larry Schweikart&#8217;s review of &#8220;<a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/larry-schweikart/the-cuban-missile-crisis-world-saved-by-the-soviets-says-oliver-stone/">The Cuban Missile Crisis,</a>&#8221; the 6th episode.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/larry-schweikart/a-history-lesson-for-oliver-stone-on-vietnam/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>29</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>The Cuban Missile Crisis: World Saved by the Soviets, Says Oliver Stone</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/larry-schweikart/the-cuban-missile-crisis-world-saved-by-the-soviets-says-oliver-stone/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-cuban-missile-crisis-world-saved-by-the-soviets-says-oliver-stone</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/larry-schweikart/the-cuban-missile-crisis-world-saved-by-the-soviets-says-oliver-stone/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 18 Jan 2013 04:43:51 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Larry Schweikart]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=173898</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A radical filmmaker's hateful fantasies continue in his Neo-Communist documentary series.   ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/larry-schweikart/the-cuban-missile-crisis-world-saved-by-the-soviets-says-oliver-stone/1015-cuban-missile-crisis-jfk-and-khrushchev-meet_full_600-2/" rel="attachment wp-att-173904"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-173904" title="1015-Cuban-Missile-Crisis-JFK-and-Khrushchev-meet_full_600" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/1015-Cuban-Missile-Crisis-JFK-and-Khrushchev-meet_full_6001-445x350.jpg" alt="" width="267" height="210" /></a><em>Editor’s note: The following is the sixth installment of a series of articles Frontpage is running in response to Oliver Stone’s neo-Communist documentary series, “The Untold History of the United States.” Frontpage will be reviewing each episode of the Stone series, exposing the leftist hateful lies about America and setting the record straight. Below is a review of Part 6 of the series.</em></p>
<p>Perhaps at one time Oliver Stone was considered a great director. If that was the case, it ceased to be true after such doozies such as “Alexander,” “World Trade Center,” and even “Savages” (which looked like a Michael Bay film sans explosions). At any rate, he has now become a documentarian, pursuing a Howard Zinn-type bash-America series called “The Untold History of the United States.” (It should be obvious that the reason it is “untold” is that it’s pure fiction.) Predictably, the series applies a far-left spin to history, and it is here where Stone is at his most clever, because he uses just enough truth to convince people to buy his counterfeit depiction of America’s past.</p>
<p>In Episode 6, “JFK to the Brink,” Stone has a difficult problem: he had to make JFK and Khrushchev <em>both</em> look good after first portraying Kennedy as, for the most part, a war monger. Astoundingly—but not surprisingly—Stone paints as the hero of the Cuban Missile Crisis a KGB agent stationed on a Soviet sub who convinced the captain not to fire his missiles while being depth charged by the Americans. Anyone who knows the first thing about submarines understands that to fire missiles a sub has to ascend to within 100 feet of the surface (or a missile will not clear its tube) and if it gets that close it is fully visible to anti-submarine warfare sonars and aircraft. In short, the captain didn’t ascend to launch because he would have been sunk before he got a single missile launched.</p>
<p>But I digress: Stone describes a John Kennedy who at the same time was cowed by the “older” Joint Chiefs of Staff (always making sure to note that they were older), while at the same time portraying him as a rugged individualist who resisted pressure from his entire cabinet, the CIA, and the military. While it is absolutely true that JFK, on occasion, thought the Joint Chiefs were too aggressive, it is also undeniable that Kennedy was a typical Cold Warrior who ran to Nixon’s right on a fictitious “missile gap.” Here, again, Stone simply lies: Kennedy knew full well that there was no “missile gap” as he had been briefed by Eisenhower, and if he didn’t know it prior to November 1960, he certainly knew it within weeks, due to the requisite briefing by the incumbent president to the new occupant of the Oval Office (contrary to Stone’s claim that “it took three weeks” for Kennedy, after assuming the presidency in January, to learn the truth about the U.S. and Soviet arsenals). Employing cheap-looking graphics, Stone claims that the U.S. had massive advantages in bombs, bombers, nuclear weapons, subs, and other strategic assets. But he cleverly conflates <em>warheads</em>, which, yes, we had plenty of, with <em>launchers and delivery systems</em>, where we were much closer to parity with the Soviets. This became a standard mantra of the peace movement from the 1960s on, claiming (correctly) that we had enough nuclear weapons to destroy the world many times over, but failing to discern the difference between warheads in a secure facility and actual launchers.</p>
<p>Although Stone briefly reviews the history of the Iron Curtain and Berlin, he never addresses the most fundamental question of why so many people fled for their lives from collectivism, and he fails to mention that JFK was humiliated in negotiations with Khrushchev in Vienna. Surprisingly, Stone gets almost correct the number of “advisors” the U.S. had in Vietnam in 1963, but perpetuates the “myth of the 1,000&#8243;—the American engineering battalions pulled out when their construction work was finished—and cites this as evidence that Kennedy planned to withdraw from Vietnam after he was reelected. Contrary to Stone, JFK had little to do with Laos. The issue was settled by Eisenhower when Ike recognized the situation was already almost hopeless.</p>
<p>Standing center stage of the one-hour program is the Cuban Missile Crisis. Contrary to Stone, the “Cubans” did not have tactical nuclear weapons, but rather the <em>Russians</em> had stationed tactical nuclear weapons there. While the risk was still extreme, the Soviets not only kept the weapons secret, but carefully secured them from the Cubans. Nevertheless, the entire Missile Crisis episode is riddled with errors. A B-52 is shown while Stone’s narrative discusses a U-2 spy plane. Stone’s claim that JFK was reversing course in Cuba completely ignores the fact that his brother, Bobby, was running a plan with the CIA and Juan Almeida, the commander of Cuba’s army, to assassinate Castro. This was, it is argued by Lamar Waldron, the reason Bobby’s hands were tied in the Kennedy assassination investigation—it would have exposed his, and his brother’s, coup attempts in process at the moment Kennedy was killed (see Waldron, <em>Legacy of Secrecy</em>, 2009). Indeed, JFK had no change of heart regarding Cuba. He only wanted the coup to be clean, and without American fingerprints. Stone cites Operation Mongoose—which Kennedy approved—as a comical attempt to kill Castro, but never mentions the Almeida coup plans.</p>
<p>In Stone’s analysis, the erection of the Berlin Wall prevented war, and he quoted Kennedy, “better a wall than a war.” Of course, there didn’t have to be either. Throughout, Khrushchev appears insightful, heroic, and steadfast while Kennedy is confused, inconsistent, and entirely maneuvered by the Soviets. A nuclear holocaust was averted, Stone claimed, when an American destroyer was depth-charging a Soviet strategic missile sub, and even thought the captain wanted to follow his orders and launch his missiles, a wise and compassionate KGB agent on board persuaded him not to fire.</p>
<p>Much of Stone’s analysis is generational. Concluding the program with Kennedy’s inaugural, in which he claimed the torch had been passed to a new generation, Stone claims that with JFK’s death the torch went right back to the “old generation” that included Johnson, Nixon, and . . . Reagan. Yet McNamara, the architect of much of the Vietnam disaster, was only one year older than JFK; Nixon, only four years older. Kennedy’s massive character flaws receive one scant sentence, while his military career is described in the most glowing terms (ignoring the fact that as an officer he was entirely derelict in his duty and should have been court-martialed for the PT-109 incident).</p>
<p>Repeatedly Stone pits Kennedy against the military and the CIA, yet glosses over JFK’s own secret war in Laos, and if Kennedy indeed wanted to “splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces,” his attitude seems to have quickly changed because in November 1961 he expressed his gratitude for the “services” and “successes” of the Agency, and in January he wrote director John McCone to express his “deep admiration for [the Agency’s] achievements.” Yet again, in October, just a month before his death, Kennedy said, “I can find nothing, and I have looked through the record very carefully over the last nine months . . .  to indicate that the CIA has done anything but support policy. . . .”</p>
<p>When it came to JFK in Vietnam, not only does Stone sidestep Kennedy’s buildup there, but he exonerates JFK from any responsibility for Ngo Dien Diem’s death. The position, of course, is preposterous: both Kennedys knew exactly what a Third World coup involved, and certainly the overthrow of Rafael Trujillo in May 1961 provided a roadmap as to what happened in such coups. (There is some speculation that the CIA, under Kennedy’s orders, was involved in Trujillo’s death as well.) And Stone doesn’t mention that Kennedy contemplated nuking Red China if another war with India broke out—hardly the musings of a pacifist resisting the warmongering JCS.</p>
<p>Stylistically, Stone uses images almost exclusively, with his own robotic narration. On occasion, however, he employs voice-overs of Russian-accented actors to “speak” for Khrushchev and a voice-over of General Curtis LeMay. There is a single (poor) animation, no on-camera interviews—just Stone’s monotonous voice and imagery. And all of the Castro shots show a laughing, cheerful leader with happy people celebrating their slavery. But Nixon, the members of the military, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the CIA are routinely depicted as villainous, dark, nefarious, and angry. Stone’s narration and documentary style is, fortunately, the silver lining for the rest of us. Few will be able to stay awake during this snoozer, especially younger viewers, and therefore they won’t be subjected to Stone’s erroneous facts or his absurd revisionist  fantasy. One would learn more about American history and Cuban relations during this era from the Starz original series “Magic City.”</p>
<p><strong>Related articles on Stone’s series:</strong></p>
<p>1. <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/bruce-thornton/oliver-stones-left-wing-agitprop/">Bruce Thornton’s introduction</a> to this Frontpage series.</p>
<p>2. <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/david-horowitz/neo-communism-out-of-the-closet/">David Horowitz&#8217;s analysis</a> of the meaning behind the warm reception of Stone&#8217;s Kremlin propaganda.</p>
<p>3. <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/matthew-vadum/oliver-stones-untrue-history-stalin-the-great-hero-of-wwii/">Matthew Vadum’s review</a> of Stone’s first episode.</p>
<p>4. Daniel Flynn’s review of “<a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/daniel-flynn/through-oliver-stones-looking-glass/">Roosevelt, Truman and Wallace</a>,” the second episode.</p>
<p>5. Daniel Greenfield’s <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/dgreenfield/the-atom-bomb-and-the-truth-bomb/">review of “The Bomb,”</a> the third episode.</p>
<p>6. Bruce Thornton’s review of “<a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-thornton/oliver-stones-cold-war-melodrama/">The Cold War: 1945-1950</a>,” the 4th episode.</p>
<p>7. Matthew Vadum&#8217;s review of &#8220;<a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/matthew-vadum/oliver-stones-distortion-of-the-eisenhower-era/">The 50s: Eisenhower, The Bomb &amp; The Third World</a>,&#8221; the 5th episode.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/larry-schweikart/the-cuban-missile-crisis-world-saved-by-the-soviets-says-oliver-stone/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>22</slash:comments>
		</item>
	</channel>
</rss>

<!-- Performance optimized by W3 Total Cache. Learn more: http://www.w3-edge.com/wordpress-plugins/

Object Caching 440/475 objects using disk
Content Delivery Network via cdn.frontpagemag.com

 Served from: www.frontpagemag.com @ 2014-12-31 07:24:05 by W3 Total Cache -->