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	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; Oliver Stone</title>
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		<title>Venezuela&#8217;s Top 10 Useful Idiots and Propagandists, Pt. I</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/david-paulin/venezuelas-top-10-useful-idiots-and-propagandists-pt-i/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=venezuelas-top-10-useful-idiots-and-propagandists-pt-i</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 21 Apr 2014 04:40:20 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[David Paulin]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Bart Jones]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Chávez]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Eva Golinger]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Joe Kennedy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Oliver Stone]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Socialism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Venezuela]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[Shilling for Chavista tyranny and terror. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/2014-02-25T175801Z_01_TBR06_RTRIDSP_3_VENEZUELA-PROTEST.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-223830" alt="2014-02-25T175801Z_01_TBR06_RTRIDSP_3_VENEZUELA-PROTEST" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/2014-02-25T175801Z_01_TBR06_RTRIDSP_3_VENEZUELA-PROTEST-450x299.jpg" width="270" height="179" /></a>Food shortages. Economic chaos. Out-of-control crime. Things have never been quite so bad in oil-rich Venezuela. Massive and bloody anti-government protests have roiled the South American nation for more than two months &#8212; a response to what Hugo Chávez&#8217;s &#8220;21st Century socialism&#8221; has wrought to a nation that ought to be rich, but is instead poor.</p>
<p>Hugo Chávez can&#8217;t be blamed for everything, however.</p>
<p>The late Venezuelan president got plenty of help from a myriad group of useful idiots and propagandists. They helped sweep him into power in 1999 and gave him various kinds of support during his 14 years of increasingly autocratic rule, until dying of cancer one year ago. Now they&#8217;re giving their unquestioning support to his hand-picked successor, Nicolás Maduro &#8212; a bus driver and former union leader &#8212; who is doubling downs on Chávez&#8217;s policies. Maduro has ramped up Cuba&#8217;s role in Venezuela and, with the help of Cuban security agents and goons, has ordered a brutal crack-down on anti-government protests. He has jailed opposition figures on trumped-up charges while professing a desire for a dialogue with opposition leaders. Human rights groups are outraged. But not the worst of Venezuela&#8217;s useful idiots.</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Who are they?</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Living in Venezuela, the United States and overseas, they include left-wing politicians, government officials, journalists, and Hollywood filmmakers. Some unwittingly facilitated Hugo Chávez&#8217;s Bolivarian revolution and subsequently admitted they were duped after belatedly recognizing Chávez&#8217;s malevolence. But the most odious of them &#8212; the true believers &#8212; have proudly set aside their moral compass to worship at the alter of socialist ideology, much to the delight of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela.</span></p>
<p>And here are the first five of the top ten &#8230;</p>
<p><b>Eva Golinger</b></p>
<p>Eva Golinger, a lawyer and writer based in Brooklyn, is hands-down Venezuela&#8217;s biggest propagandist. The 40-year-old Venezuelan-American was a confident of the late President Chavez. She often appears on Venezuela&#8217;s state radio and television to defend Venezuela&#8217;s so-called &#8220;Bolivarian revolution.&#8221; Speaking with a think American accent, she promotes the virtues of socialism, belittles the opposition, and elaborates on the latest plot that Venezuela claims Washington has hatched against it.</p>
<p>“I’m a soldier for this revolution,” Golinger told The New York Times three years ago. In its<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/05/world/americas/05venezuela.html?_r=0"> profile</a>, &#8220;In Venezuela, an American has the President&#8217;s Ear,&#8221; The Times called her &#8220;one of the most prominent fixtures of Venezuela’s expanding state propaganda complex.&#8221;</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Recently, Golinger defended the Maduro regime during an interview on</span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://latino.foxnews.com/latino/politics/2014/03/25/puppet-or-defender-us-woman-who-trumpets-venezuelan-chavismo-is-lightning-rod/"> Fox News Latino</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">, even as his security forces were engaged in a brutal crack-down against massive anti-government protests. Human rights groups were outraged, but not Golinger. “The protesters have been a minority of people…concentrated in upper and middle class areas,&#8221; she claimed. But there have been reports of lower-class Venezuelans increasingly joining the anti-government protests. Maduro also didn&#8217;t inherit Chávez&#8217;s halo or ability to sail to comfortable election wins. In balloting shortly after Chávez&#8217;s death, Maduro won by a razor-thin margin. This was despite credible claims that like Chávez, he benefited from election irregularities and voter intimidation including by </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Chavista</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> motorcycle thugs.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Born at Langley Air Force Base in Virginia, Golinger&#8217;s father was a military psychiatrist during the Vietnam War. She enjoyed a privileged life as a doctor&#8217;s daughter; yet she ridicules Venezuela&#8217;s opposition leaders for having attended prestigious schools in the United States, something she suggests makes them out of touch with ordinary Venezuelans. Golinger, for her part, attended preppy Sarah Lawrence College near New York City. When not living in her upscale apartment in Caracas, she earned a law degree at City University of New York.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">In 2010, Chávez took her on one of his globetrotting trips aimed at building anti-American alliances; it included stops in Syria, Iran and Libya. Chávez introduced her as &#8220;La novia de Venezuela&#8221; or &#8220;Venezuela&#8217;s girlfriend.&#8221;</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Golinger writes for pro-Venezuela websites, hosts a weekly show on RT Spanish (formerly called Russian Television), and is the author of &#8220;The Chávez Code: Cracking US Intervention in Venezuela&#8221; and &#8220;Bush vs. Chávez: Washington&#8217;s War on Venezuela.&#8221; She also writes for the leftist site Venezuelanalysis.com. How much she earns for such work is unknown.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Golinger has denied being on Venezuela&#8217;s payroll, but opposition activists dug up documents showing she received nearly $10,000 from the Venezuela Information Office to pay for a conference in Madison, Wisconsin, on media reform.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">True believers like Golinger, however, never shill only for money, and nor did her counterparts among earlier generations of Americans &#8212; all those starry-eyed leftists who happily shilled for the Soviet Union, China, and Cuba. Like Golinger, they burned with the desire to be part of something greater than themselves &#8212; the creation of a heaven on earth. A socialist utopia.</span></p>
<p><b>Oliver Stone</b></p>
<p>Hollywood has produced more than its share of useful idiots and propagandists over the years. First, they rallied around the Soviet Union. Then Cuba. Now they see Venezuela as an emerging socialist utopia.</p>
<p>Oliver Stone, the director and screenwriter, is Venezuela&#8217;s biggest propagandist in Hollywood &#8212; more so than celebrities like actors Danny Glover and Sean Penn who, like Stone, regarded Hugo Chávez as a friend and ideological soul mate. Stone has by far the greatest propaganda value for Venezuela&#8217;s leftist regime, however.</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Consider his 2009 documentary &#8220;South of the Border.&#8221; It explores the rise of leftist governments and movements in South America which were inspired by Hugo Chávez&#8217;s election and enjoyed his oil largesse. To Stone, these movements are the answer to the region&#8217;s economic development. At the film&#8217;s premiere at the Venice Film Festival, Stone was photographed hobnobbing with Chávez on numerous occasions &#8212; even as he was being widely condemned by right groups. But Stone has called Chávez nice guy. Not surprisingly, Stone didn&#8217;t bother to interview opposition leaders when making the film, which he promoted on a tour of South America.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Stone&#8217;s next documentary was &#8220;Mi Amigo Hugo,&#8221; about his friendship with Chávez. On the first anniversary of Chávez&#8217;s death last March 5th, Venezuela&#8217;s government premiered the film on state television and (by government edict) private television channels. Talk about a captive audience! Stone wasn&#8217;t on hand in Venezuela for the premiere; it was just as well because massive and bloody anti-government protests were then underway &#8212; fueled by outrage over food shortages, out-of-control crime, and a dysfunctional economy. Danny Glover, however, did show up and gave a rousing speech in support of Venezuela&#8217;s &#8220;21st Century socialism.&#8221;</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Over the years, many of Stone&#8217;s films have had a leftist and anti-American agenda. The most recent example was &#8220;The Untold History of the United States&#8221; &#8212; an anti-American hatchet job that aired last year on the the Showtime cable channel. And let&#8217;s not forget &#8220;JFK&#8221; which taught millions of young and impressionable viewers that President John F. Kennedy was murdered by right-wing conspirators tied to America&#8217;s vast military-industrial complex.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Left-wing filmmaker Michael Moore used to be one of Chávez&#8217;s useful idiots, incidentally; but he had a falling out with Chávez&#8217;s thin-skinned supporters after claiming to have given Chávez political advice and helped him write a U.N. speech. This supposedly happened during a late-night drinking session with the strongman in his hotel room at the Venice Film Festival.</span></p>
<p>Stone, ironically, has made millions of dollars in the United States thanks to its free-markets, rule of law, and respect for private property &#8212; and yet he believes that Venezuela, Cuba, and South America is better off without these virtues.</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Stone is not only a shill for tyranny, he is an incredible hypocrite.</span></p>
<p><b>Bart Jones</b></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Bart Jones, a left-learning American journalist, was a &#8220;local hire&#8221; reporter for the Caracas bureau of the Associated Press in the mid-1990s, back when Venezuela was a relative backwater. He didn&#8217;t start out as a journalist in Venezuela, however. In 1992, he went there as a missionary for the left-leaning Maryknoll order of the US Catholic Church. He worked 18 months in a slum where he soaked up huge amounts of right-wing social injustices (as he saw it) and then joined the AP. By dint of hard work and talent, Jones eventually became one of the bureau&#8217;s lead reporters &#8212; just in time to cover Hugo Chávez&#8217;s unexpected rise to power.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Who would have guessed that Jones was a closet </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Chavista</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> while writing all those supposedly objective articles for the AP? His political views were on display in his 2009 </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.amazon.com/Hugo-Chavez-Story-Perpetual-Revolution-ebook/dp/B002BH5HTE/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1397757737&amp;sr=8-1&amp;keywords=Bart+Jones">biography</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> of Chávez: &#8220;Hugo! The Hugo Chávez Story from Mud Hut to Perpetual Revolution.&#8221; The book has gotten many reviews and is highly readable. It is the only source of in-depth information for many hankering to learn about Hugo Chávez and his so-called Bolivarian revolution. Jones, however, delivers a decidedly lefty view &#8212; presenting Chávez as a veritable saint and portraying all who disagree with him as classists, racists, or oligarchs. To Jones, Venezuela&#8217;s troubles revolve around a brown-skinned poor majority living under the thump of a white-skinned elite. A simplistic leftist narrative, it ignores the rainbow of colors existing among Venezuelans, including among more than a few of its politicians over the years.</span></p>
<p>Jones also condemns Venezuela&#8217;s private media as doing the dirty work of anti-Chávez oligarchs. In particular, he lashes into its biased coverage (and, yes, it was definitely slanted) during Chávez&#8217;s brief ouster during a failed military-civilian uprising on April 11, 2002. Private media outlets, however, didn&#8217;t start out being virulently anti-Chávez; they only started waving the anti-Chávez banner when Chávez played a gigantic bait-and-switch on Venezuela &#8212; imposing a socialist regime despite having claimed to be a moderate, not a socialist, during his first election campaign. As Jones skewers the anti-Chávez media, one wonders if he is similarly troubled about how most of America&#8217;s mainstream media was in Barack Obama&#8217;s camp from the get go. Jones surely cherishes his first amendment protections, yet he seems delighted that Venezuela&#8217;s government has neutered private media outlets or driven them out of business.</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">It&#8217;s troubling that Jones researched much of his book long after Chávez had revealed himself to be a megalomaniac &#8212; a despot who was leading Venezuela toward an authoritarian and poverty-ridden abyss. Checks and balances were dissolved, power was concentrated in Chávez&#8217;s hands, and quality-of-life indices took a nose dive. Human rights groups were alarmed. But not Jones. He shrugs off Chávez&#8217;s authoritarianism and personal excesses, including his womanizing and purchase of an Airbus 319 presidential jet that he rode on with Chávez; it wasn&#8217;t as opulent, he wrote, as Chávez&#8217;s critics had claimed. To Jones, Chávez can do no wrong because he is ruling in behalf of Venezuela&#8217;s poor majority.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Jones, incidentally, rented an apartment a few floors above me in an upscale complex on a tony corner of eastern Caracas, now an opposition stronghold. One day, Bart and I ran into each other at the entrance. We talked shop for a few minutes, and I asked about his thoughts on Chávez&#8217;s growing and inexplicable anti-American rhetoric.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Jones was normally calm and affable, but he suddenly launched into a frothy anti-American rant, declaring the United States had unleashed unspeakable atrocities upon Latin America in the past, and so it was totally understandable that Chávez was now telling those in Washington to go &#8220;f&#8211;k themselves.&#8221;</span></p>
<p>This, incidentally, was during Bill Clinton&#8217;s presidency. But like many of Chávez&#8217;s worshipers, Jones was living in another era. Not long after our conversation, in early 2000, Jones moved to Long Island, New York, and became a reporter for Newsday, a daily with a politically left-wing outlook.</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">How lucky for Jones that he and his Venezuelan-born wife aren&#8217;t raising their children in the country that he regards as a beacon of emerging social justice.</span></p>
<p><b>Joseph P. Kennedy II</b></p>
<p>Joe Kennedy II has been the Venezuelan government&#8217;s favorite useful idiot in Massachusetts since 2005. Since then, the former U.S. representative and scion of the Kennedy family has facilitated and cheered on what amounts to an anti-American program by oil-rich yet impoverished Venezuela. Though his non-profit Citizens Energy Corporation, Kennedy and Venezuela&#8217;s government provide free home-heating oil to needy Americans.</p>
<p>In so doing, Kennedy and Venezuela&#8217;s leaders get to portray themselves as heroes of the poor. The media-savvy Chávez started the program and Maduro has continued with it &#8212; even as Venezuela&#8217;s inflation-wracked economy slides toward basket-case status. CITGO Petroleum Corporation, the Houston-based arm of Venezuela’s state oil company, claims that more than 235 million gallons of home-heating oil have been distributed over the past nine years to more than 1.8 million low-income Americans.</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Joining Kennedy are two Democratic politicians who </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://nypost.com/2013/03/10/rfk-son-is-oil-broken-up-over-chavez-death/">negotiated</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> the oil deal: former Rep. Bill Delahunt from Massachusetts, who had served on the Foreign Affairs Committee, and Queens Rep. Gregory Meeks, who took off time from fighting corruption allegations to attended Chávez’s funeral last year. Both reportedly introduced Kennedy to Chávez on a trip to Caracas.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Kennedy, to be sure, isn&#8217;t as stupid as he seems. Citizen&#8217;s Energy reportedly pays him a cool $86,311 annually.</span></p>
<p><b>Kim Bartley and Donnacha O&#8217;Briain</b></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Kim Bartley and Donnacha O&#8217;Briain, young and lefty Irish filmmakers, arrived in Venezuela in September 2001 to make a documentary about firebrand leftist president Hugo Chávez.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Their research took an unexpected turn after seven months.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">On April 11, 2002, while in the presidential palace, Chávez was briefly ousted from power amid massive pro- and anti-government marches in response to Chávez&#8217;s increasingly polarizing leadership. At least 20 people died and more than 150 received gunshot wounds, with some gunfire coming from shadowy snipers whose allegiances and motives were never determined.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Their riveting 2003 documentary, &#8220;The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,&#8221; attracted large audiences and generated rave reviews. It won some prestigious awards.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">It also is riddled with errors and manipulated footage &#8212; all to serve the pro-Chávez leftist narrative they had gone to Venezuela to film.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">As useful idiots, they dished up a huge wallop of international propaganda for Chávez&#8217;s increasingly embattled government. To Chávez&#8217;s delight, they portrayed his outster as an old-fashioned Latin American-style coup involving right-wing oligarchs backed by Washington (the Bush administration in this case).</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Venezuela&#8217;s government never set up a non-partisan commission to establish what precisely transpired, perhaps due to political convenience; or so observed the </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://caracaschronicles.com/2004/04/14/the-untold-story-of-venezuelas-2002-april-crisis-2/">Caracas Chronicles </a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">blog, citing newspaper columns by opposition editor Teodoro Petkoff, a prominent former Marxist guerrilla and now opposition figure with neoliberal economic views.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">So what happened behind the scenes during Chávez&#8217;s ouster for 47 hours?</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Level-headed journalists and analysts without an ideological ax to grind have variously described the military-civilian uprising against Chávez as evolving from a self-coup that Chávez orchestrated (in order to dissolve Congress and Supreme Court and declare martial law); a coup against him by top generals (spurred mainly by Chávez&#8217;s illegal order to turn the military loose on anti-government protesters and create a bloodbath); or a counter-coup due to concerns by generals and officials, including some loyal to Chávez, about where the uprising was heading. They believed Chávez&#8217;s ouster, while appropriate, had nevertheless proceed in an unconstitutional direction when newly appointed president Pedro Carmona, a businessman who headed the business chamber Fedecamaras, moved to dissolve Congress. This also lost him union support that was vital for successful governance.</span></p>
<p>It&#8217;s a complicated story, to be sure. But the leftist version makes for a more thrilling documentary and serves a leftist narrative &#8212; even if the truth is wildly distorted. Or as veteran journalist Phil Gunson <a href="http://www.vcrisis.com/print.php?content=letters/200405200431">explained</a> in The Columbia Journalism Review: &#8220;Constructing a false picture of a classic military coup devised by an allegedly corrupt and racist oligarchy, they omit key facts, invent others, twist the sequence of events to support their case, and replace inconvenient images with others dredged from archives.&#8221;</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Gunson, a former Caracas correspondent, noted that the film portrays the opposition as &#8220;rich, white, racist, and violent. Unseen are the armed bands of </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Chavista </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">thugs who for years have made the center of Caracas a no-go area, beating up or shooting opposition marchers or TV crews who dare to approach.&#8221;</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The film&#8217;s title takes its name from the fact that the opposition media excluded the </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Chavista</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> point of view from its coverage. But Venezuela&#8217;s private media outlets, as mentioned above, hadn&#8217;t always been virulently anti-Chávez; they got that way after Chávez revealed himself to be an authoritarian leftist &#8212; not the moderate he&#8217;d claimed to be during his first election campaign.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">In portraying the private media as being anti-Democratic oligarchs, &#8220;The Revolution Will Not Be Televised&#8221; also omits the fact that, as protesters were being shot in the street, Chávez ordered radio and television channels to carry one of his long-winded speeches. As the shooting and violence continued, private broadcasters then put up a split screen &#8212; one side showing the violence in the streets, the other showing Chávez&#8217;s speech. In response, Chávez ordered the National Guard to shut down private television stations.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">What&#8217;s more, Chávez wasn&#8217;t restored to office by &#8220;people power&#8221;; that is, by massive street demonstrations by his slum-dwelling supporters. He was returned to power as a result of behind-the-scenes political intrigues. And after that happened, his supporters took to the streets.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The lefty BBC, Ireland’s RTE, and other European broadcasters underwrote &#8220;This Revolution Will Not be Televised,&#8221; noted Gunson. Chávez had 20,000 copies made in Cuba.</span></p>
<p>As a rejoinder to the poisonous falsehoods of &#8220;This Revolution Will Not Be Televised,&#8221; a documentary was released in 2004 called &#8220;Radiografía De Una Mentira&#8221; <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DtDl7SuHRkM">(&#8220;X-Ray of a Lie</a>&#8220;). It was not a box office hit, having only been released (with English-subtitles) on YouTube and on DVDs.</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Winning back hearts and minds bewitched by leftist propaganda is invariably an uphill battle.</span></p>
<p><em><strong>Read Part II of this article in tomorrow&#8217;s edition of FrontPage Magazine. </strong></em></p>
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		<title>Oliver Stone Does Venezuela</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/humberto-fontova/oliver-stone-does-venezuela/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=oliver-stone-does-venezuela</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 11 Mar 2014 04:12:30 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Humberto Fontova]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Oliver Stone]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=220628</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The PR king of government oppression. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/venezuela.png"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-220728" alt="venezuela" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/venezuela.png" width="319" height="247" /></a>Famous foe of imperialism Oliver Stone just premiered his documentary <i>“Mi Amigo </i><em>Hugo</em><i>”</i> <i>(“</i><em>My Friend Hugo</em><i>”) </i>in the Cuban colony of Venezuela<i>. </i>As the title suggests, the film honors Hugo Chavez, Cuba’s late Venezuelan viceroy. The film was released amidst lavish celebrations on the first anniversary of Chavez’s death and broadcast on the Cuba-run TV channel of the Cuban viceroyalty of Venezuela. For the occasion, Raul Castro himself graced his South American dominion with a visit.</p>
<p>“Venezuela today is a country that is practically occupied by the henchmen of two international criminals, Cuba&#8217;s Castro brothers,” recently declared Luis Miquilena<b> </b>who served as<b> </b>Hugo Chavez’ Minister of Justice for three years before finally resigning in disgust. “They (the Cubans) have introduced in Venezuela a true army of occupation. The Cubans run the maritime ports, airports, communications, the most essential issues in Venezuela. We are in the hands of a foreign country. <a href="http://www.capitolhillcubans.com/2014/03/chavez-mentor-venezuela-has-been.html">This is the darkest period in our history.”</a></p>
<p>The Chavez documentary comes twelve years after the premiere at the Sundance Film Festival of Oliver Stone’s documentary <i>“Comandante,”</i> which honored Venezuela’s foreign emperor himself:  Fidel Castro.</p>
<p>&#8221;I am like a prisoner,&#8221; Castro laments to Stone near the beginning of “<i>Comandante.</i>” The Stalinist dictator was referring to the travails that accompany his selfless vocation of running Cuba.  “This is my cell,&#8221; he sighs while pointing around.  At this declaration from the jailer of more political prisoner per-capita than Stalin, the famously “edgy” Oliver Stone reveals no hint of a smirk. And no snarkiness tinged his follow-up questions, most of which hovered right over home plate. When a few questions strayed from the banal talking points and Castro answered evasively, Stone twinkled that, “his elusiveness is always charming.&#8221;</p>
<p>&#8221;Fidel is magnetic and charismatic,&#8221; Stone concluded.  “He is a movie star.&#8221;</p>
<p>Alas, he’s getting a little long in the tooth for close-ups. So Stone has since shifted the focus of his camera lenses over to the more camera-friendly subject of Castro’s colony, Venezuela.</p>
<p>Nowadays the Cuba-enthroned emperor of Venezuela more or less reigns while his baby brother Raul rules. The actual nuts and bolts of running the empire, which include stealing 100,000 barrels of oil daily from their Venezuelan viceroyalty as priority, comes courtesy of the 50,000 Cubans who infest Venezuela and run the colony’s vital police and intelligence functions, among many others. It took the Castros some doing, but they finally got Venezuela in the bag. To wit:</p>
<p>Fidel Castro’s very first trip abroad as head of state was to Venezuela where on January 25, 1959 he implored Venezuelan President Romulo Betancourt to “join” his “master plan <i>against</i> the gringos.” The newly elected Venezuelan president soon learned that his “joining” would consist of massive loans, financial aid, and shipments of free oil to Castro from Venezuela. So Betancourt brusquely declined the “invitation.” It took Hugo Chavez for Venezuela to finally “join” Castro’s master plan.</p>
<p>Please note the date and the aggressive anti-U.S. policy Castro proposed to Venezuela. That was only two weeks after Fidel Castro <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Longest-Romance-Mainstream-Media-Castro/dp/1594036675/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1376276049&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=the+longest+romance+humberto+fontova">(with U.S. help)</a> entered Havana. And yet you’ll be hard-pressed to find a U.S. “academic expert” who doesn’t swear up and down that in 1959-61 the U.S. arrogantly, selfishly and stupidly snubbed a friendly Fidel Castro and pushed him—kicking and screaming, no less&#8211; into the arms of the Russians.</p>
<p>As the title of Stone’s new film suggests, the filmmaker does not hide his veneration for Cuban satrap Hugo Chavez any more than he did for his mass-murdering, war-mongering colonial master Fidel Castro. This makes Stone’s propaganda films for Latin American communists less effective than those of his fellow filmmaker Robert Redford, who with his Motorcycle Diaries performed services for the image of Che Guevara that no Madison Avenue agency could hope to match for a client. To compare Stone to Redford simply compare Julius Streicher to Leni Riefensthal.</p>
<p>Oliver Stone claims that the massive protests currently rocking Venezuela are simply the CIA’s handiwork, with a few Venezuelans in the role of local patsies. Given all the hidden hands and plotters and “patsies” in Stone’s movie JFK, we can barely wait to see what a tangled web Stone will eventually weave regarding the current Venezuelan crisis.</p>
<p>Three weeks before departing for Venezuela to premier his communist infomercial Oliver Stone was among the honored speakers at the recent “2014 International Students for Liberty Conference.”  The crowd at this Libertarian-Palooza, <a href="http://news.yahoo.com/oliver-stone-and-the-libertarians-215632840.html">according to some accounts</a>, was absolutely mitten with a man who devotes much of his time and fortune to glorifying dictators who abolish private property and murder entrepreneurs. Apparently these aren’t your father’s libertarians.</p>
<p>The only fuddy-duddy scoffers were a handful of Latin American students with first-hand experience of the handiwork by the communists Stone exalts in speech, print and film. Funny how that works.</p>
<p>Stone’s advocacy and infomercials for Castroism and Chavismo have brought him under fire recently in social media. But he’s been quick to fire back. “You (critics) remind me of crazy Tea Partiers!” he recently snarled on his Facebook page.  More horribly still his critics are: “Similar to the right-wing Florida Cuban exiles who’ve helped keep the US in a dungeon of ignorance.”</p>
<p>Speaking of dungeons, ignorance and Cuban exiles.  Among these latter Stone can find the most and the longest suffering political prisoners in the modern history of the human race. This suffering came in torture-chambers and dungeons designed by his Stalinist idol <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Longest-Romance-Mainstream-Media-Castro/dp/1594036675/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1376276049&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=the+longest+romance+humberto+fontova">and his KGB-mentors</a>. Let’s hope Oliver Stone is merely ignorant of that.</p>
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		<title>Venezuelans Bleed Under Socialist Oppression</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/david-paulin/venezuelans-bleed-while-left-worships-their-government/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=venezuelans-bleed-while-left-worships-their-government</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 10 Mar 2014 04:45:31 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[David Paulin]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Chávez]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Government]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Oliver Stone]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Protest]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Socialism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[student]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Venezuela]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=220630</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[While the Hollywood elite cheer on the government. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/A-student-takes-part-in-a-011.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-220656" alt="A student takes part in a protest against Nicolas Maduro's government in Caracas, Venezuela." src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/A-student-takes-part-in-a-011.jpg" width="286" height="191" /></a>Massive and bloody anti-government protests have been roiling Venezuela for more than a month – provoked by an out-of-control murder rate, food shortages, and myriad instances of inept governance. But that didn&#8217;t stop a rogues&#8217; gallery of Latin leftists, including Cuban President Raul Castro, from turning up in Caracas to honor the late Hugo Chávez on the first anniversary of the Venezuelan leader&#8217;s death.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Security forces and pro-government militias have responded with a vengeance against the protesters, leaving at least 21 dead and hundreds injured. Most were students.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The tear gas, rubber bullets and </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Chavista</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> thugs on motorcycles, however, were out of sight and mind for Castro and fellow leftists, including Bolivian President Evo Morales and his Nicaraguan counterpart Daniel Ortega. Like Castro, they enjoyed Chávez&#8217;s oil largess over the years. Chávez had promoted himself as the savior of Venezuela&#8217;s poor yet gave away billions of dollars of their oil wealth as a way to expand his influence and build alliances against the United States. The firebrand socialist, famous for his colorful anti-American broadsides, died a year ago of cancer, on March 5th, at age 58.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">A couple of Hollywood heavy weights – director Oliver Stone and actor Danny Glover – lent their celebrity to Wednesday&#8217;s ceremonies that included a military parade and civic events. Glover and Stone considered Chávez a friend and ideological soulmate.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Chávez&#8217;s hand-picked successor, Nicolás Maduro – a 51-year-old former bus driver and union leader – led the ceremonies at “El Comandante&#8217;s&#8221; sacred tomb – situated in a former military museum in Caracas that had served as the command center for a disorganized and bloody coup attempt that Lt. Colonel Hugo Chávez led on February 4, 1992, against a democratic government.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">&#8220;Hugo Chávez was, without a doubt, the great leader who brought democracy. Never in history has there been a leader who so authentically loved the people of this country,&#8221; Maduro</span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303824204579421441297723368?KEYWORDS=Venezuela&amp;mg=reno64-wsj"> told </a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">cheering Chávez loyalists. The ceremony featured goose-steeping soldiers, columns of tanks, and low-flying Russian Sukhoi jets.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">A lavish spectacle, it came amid the economic and social chaos produced by what Chávez called “21st Century Socialism,&#8221; and the bread-and-circuses populism is being deepened by Maduro in the oil-rich yet impoverished South American nation. Venezuela has long been a prize for Cuba, which sponsored leftist insurgences there in the 1960s. Now, socialist Venezuela has come to look more and more </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">like</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> Cuba, where basic goods also are scarce.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Ironically, Chávez had portrayed himself during his first presidential campaign as a moderate seeking a “third way” between capitalism and socialism. Claiming he&#8217;d traded the bullet for the ballet, he pledged to reverse declining living standards and root out Venezuela&#8217;s rampant corruption. But months after his landslide election victory, he did an </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/539348/posts">about-face</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">, praising Cuba&#8217;s communism and forming a close friendship with Fidel Castro. Soon he was forming anti-American alliances with Middle Eastern strongmen such as Iraq&#8217;s Saddam Hussein and Libya&#8217;s Moammar Gadhafi. He nationalized large swaths of the economy in Venezuela; or to be precise: the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. Early into his first term, Chávez insisted on the name change &#8212; inspired by Venezulea&#8217;s aristocratic independence hero Simón Bolivar &#8212; as he pushed through a rewritten constitution in a Congress packed with his loyalists.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">As for Venezuela&#8217;s corruption, Chávez took it to new heights by allowing for the emergence of a new social class; what a Venezuelan journalist famously called the “Boliburguesía” &#8212; a portmanteau of the word&#8217;s Bolivarian and bourgeoisie. As has been </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CiqzufsT4Y&amp;list=FLhcRY22v3s3rJFFMeVY3Qrw&amp;index=8">reported</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> often over the years, in print and broadcast media, they became rich overnight thanks to sweetheart contacts, cronyism, and corruption.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Glover, however, spoke only of Chávez as a man of the people to enthusiastic applause from Chávez loyalists. “His memory lives with us through the work that you do as citizens of this great nation,” </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://arts.nationalpost.com/2014/03/07/actor-danny-glover-supports-venezuelan-government-during-visit-to-honour-hugo-chavez/">he said</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Stone didn&#8217;t attend but in an interview with a local news outlet talked wistfully of his departed friend Hugo. “I miss Chávez, miss his spirit and presence,”</span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://globovision.com/articulo/oliver-stone-extrano-a-hugo-chavez-extrano-su-espiritu-y-su-presencia"> he said</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">. Stone allowed his documentary film, “My Amigo Hugo,” to premier on Venezuela television. (The government</span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/06/world/americas/one-year-after-chavezs-death-a-divide-in-venezuelans-fervor.html?_r=0"> required </a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">all television stations, both state-owned and private, to broadcast it.)</span></p>
<p><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/gcwGp0yn9nk" height="315" width="560" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">An information war is underway. Government censorship – including twitter and Internet outages – have been another weapon the government has used in its battle against the protesters whom Stone </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.havanatimes.org/?p=102281">compared</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> to “the right-wing Cuban exiles in southern Florida.” Later, he complained that he&#8217;d been subjected to “verbal violence” over his support for the Chávez and Maduro regimes.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Social media, for its part, has helped organize the protests and shown the world the brutal handiwork of Venezuela&#8217;s security forces. Twitter&#8217;s SOSVenezuela has buzzed with photos claiming to show Cuban troops and military aircraft in Venezuela. Opposition protesters are convinced that Cubans are participating in the repressive crack-down against students. Over the years, Chávez invited many Cuban security agents and advisers into the country to help solidify his socialist rule.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Bread and circuses populism has a long history in Venezuela, as does statism and authoritarianism. But Chávez took these things to new heights. Now after 11 years of Chávez, and one year of Maduro, who is doubling down on Chávez&#8217;s policies, Venezuela is sliding toward basket case status. It has one of the world&#8217;s worst murder rates. Shortages of basic goods &#8212; including milk, medicines, and toilet paper – are common due to currency exchange and price controls that have made it unprofitable for business to import goods. And things are bound to get worse after recent government edicts requiring retailers and businesses to offer government-set “fair prices.” “</span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.laht.com/article.asp?ArticleId=1599572&amp;CategoryId=10717">Good Morning, Communism</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">!” declared the respected newsletter VenEcomony after analyzing the impact of Maduro&#8217;s recent “economic war” against supposedly bourgeoisie retailers and businessmen. Maduro has called the opposition “fascists” and dupes of “Yankee imperialists.”</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Venezuela has become a polarized country divided into two ideological camps, thanks mainly to class-warrior Chávez. And last month, opposition leader </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-02-20/leopoldo-lopez-the-venezuela-oppositions-new-hero">Leopoldo López</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">, a 42-year-old Harvard-educated politician and former mayor, was sent to jail on trumped up charges, including murder and inciting rioters, for having lent his support to the ongoing street protests.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">“HE WHO tires, loses”: that was the </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.economist.com/news/americas/21596945-after-opposition-leader-arrested-violence-continues-unabated-tale-two-prisoners">slogan</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> printed on a T-shirt worn by López when he was arrested among a sea of supporters. To Maduro&#8217;s outrage, López had urged protesters to continue taking their grievances to the streets with peaceful protests; it&#8217;s the only option they have left against an authoritarian government. Unarmed student demonstrators have been using two valuable weapons: twitter (#SOSVenezuea) and YouTube. Powerful videos like this have gone viral:</span></p>
<p><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/EFS6cP9auDc" height="315" width="420" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">In last April&#8217;s presidential election, Maduro prevailed over opposition leader Henrique Capriles, a state governor and former mayor, by a razor-thing 50.6 percent of the vote. Protesters rightly believe that Capriles ought to be leading the country in light of Chávez and Maduro&#8217;s demagoguery and populism on top of illegal campaign spending and threats against state employees who supported opposition candidates.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Students come mainly from the middle-class and have been the backbone of the nationwide protest movement. It started in early February in San Cristóbal, a college town in the Andean mountains of 650,000, following the sexual assault of a female student. Initially, the protests were provoked by out-of-control crime. But as they spread to every major city in Venezuela, students added additional grievances to their manifesto – corruption, electrical blackouts, and other quality-of-life issues. Here and there, there have been reports in social media of the protests spreading to working-class areas that have been traditional Chávez strongholds.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">But the hope of pulling off a Ukrainian-style revolution seems remote. The military is with Maduro, by all accounts. The students and other protesters are a minority; and so far their rage has been vented mainly against the </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">symptoms</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> of bread and circuses socialism – not against the system itself; and that system is without a doubt corrupt. It revolves in part around the popular belief, especially among the poor majority, that Venezuelans ought to be rich and entitled by dint of their oil wealth &#8212; an impossibility in Venezuela today. It&#8217;s a sirens song – the paradox of plenty, as some call it – that keeps free-market policies at bay, keeps power concentrated in the hands of a few, and lends itself to a mentality that blames others. In this culture, anti-Americanism flourishes. Free-market policies and investor-friendly laws, on the other hand, would create wealth – far more than could be pumped out of the ground.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The prophetic warning of Juan Pablo Pérez Alfonzo, a Venezuelan intellectual who was instrumental in founding OPEC, is often cited and worth quoting in respect to Venezuela&#8217;s long decline and current crisis. “Ten years from now, twenty years from now, you will see: oil will bring us ruin… Oil is the Devil&#8217;s excrement.”</span></p>
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		<title>Martin Luther King Estate Boots Oliver Stone from Biopic Over Adultery Scene</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/martin-luther-king-estate-boots-oliver-stone-from-biopic-over-adultery-scene/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=martin-luther-king-estate-boots-oliver-stone-from-biopic-over-adultery-scene</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 20 Jan 2014 20:49:12 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[martin luther king]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Oliver Stone]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=216887</guid>
		<description><![CDATA["The script dealt w/ adultery and King’s spiritual transformation into a more radical being." ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/oliver-stone_hugo-chavez.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-216888" alt="oliver-stone_hugo-chavez" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/oliver-stone_hugo-chavez.jpg" width="450" height="322" /></a></p>
<p>Oliver Stone just can&#8217;t help himself. <a href="http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Hollywood/2014/01/20/hollywood-top-5-1-20-2014">The Martin Luther King estate should probably</a> be grateful that he didn&#8217;t depict MLK killing JFK.</p>
<blockquote><p>Stone took to his Twitter account today to say that DreamWorks and Warner Bros rejected his script rewrite and that he was done with the movie that also had Jamie Foxx attached. It came down to the studios — which are in lockstep with the MLK estate that brought them the right to use his famous copyrighted speeches — rejecting Stone’s characterization of long-running rumors that King Jr. engaged in extramarital affairs.</p>
<p>&#8220;The script dealt w/ issues of adultery, conflicts within the movement, and King’s spiritual transformation into a higher, more radical being,&#8221; Stone tweeted.</p>
<p>“I’m told the estate &amp; the ‘respectable’ black community that guard King’s reputation won’t approve it. They suffocate the man &amp; the truth,” Stone tweeted. He also added a message directly to MLK: ‘I wish you could see the film I would’ve made. I fear if ‘they’ ever make it, it’ll be just another commemoration of the March on Washington.”</p></blockquote>
<p>I&#8217;m sure Martin Luther King wanted to be depicted with another woman in a movie and to be played by the guy from In Living Color who is now the default for any black biopic.</p>
<p>And he would no doubt want the movie to be directed by a guy who keeps paying tribute to leftist Latin American dictators while trading in bouts of anti-semitism.</p>
<p>The MLK estate is protecting their &#8220;brand&#8221; which they have a right to do. They also want King as a role model. Again, not a bad thing.</p>
<p>It&#8217;s doubtful that Oliver Stone really respects King. The radical left generally did not. It would not surprise me too much, if Stone had wanted to hint that the FBI was blackmailing King over adultery or something of that nature to explain why he wasn&#8217;t radical enough.</p>
<p>The &#8220;higher being&#8221; quote suggests that Stone is really trying to discard much of King&#8217;s civil rights work and to envision him becoming a proper far left figure as an explanation for his assassination.</p>
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		<title>Oliver Stone to Make Movie About Socialist Dictator Who Returns from the Dead in Bird Form</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/oliver-stone-to-make-movie-about-socialist-dictator-who-returns-from-the-dead-in-bird-form/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=oliver-stone-to-make-movie-about-socialist-dictator-who-returns-from-the-dead-in-bird-form</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 25 Dec 2013 16:22:44 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Hugo Chavez]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Nicolas Maduro]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Oliver Stone]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Venezuela]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=213864</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Oliver Stone combines his two favorite hobbies; Communism and cocaine.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/meme-del-pajarito-de-nicolas-maduro-4.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-205832" alt="meme-del-pajarito-de-nicolas-maduro-4" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/meme-del-pajarito-de-nicolas-maduro-4-450x287.jpg" width="450" height="287" /></a></p>
<p>At <a href="http://weaselzippers.us/?p=165461">least that&#8217;s the movie he would make if current</a> Venezuelan tyrant Nicolas Maduro has anything to say about it. And it&#8217;s the movie that Hugo Chavez deserves.</p>
<p>A movie that depicts Chavez&#8217;s return in bird form to Maduro, as described by Maduro, using top quality special effects. Also scenes of Chavez appearing on a subway wall and in a pile of cocaine being snorted by Maduro.</p>
<p>A movie that shows the ghost of Chavez launching the ancient Indian curse that Maduro warned would befall those who don&#8217;t vote for him. And the climax would pan up from Maduro sleeping in Chavez&#8217;s mausoleum while Chavez voters gleefully loot TV sets from electronics stores.</p>
<p>Instead Oliver Stone will probably just paste together some interviews with Hugo Chavez, scenes of him trying to make his own cars and cellphones, with attacks on George W. Bush and nobody will watch it except the same 15 aging hippies who go to all his movies and then leave muttering that he sold out to the banks because he won&#8217;t make a movie celebrating Stalin.</p>
<blockquote><p>“Oliver Stone is preparing a very lovely film about our commander-in-chief Hugo Chávez,” Maduro announced last week in an official state event following the director’s visit to the troubled state.</p>
<p>Venezuelan state TV described the visit as friendly and Stone as an award-winning director with “good relations with Venezuela,” publishing a slideshow and video of the meeting between the director and world leader.</p></blockquote>
<p>Maduro really is insane if he thinks he&#8217;s a world leader. But at least Oliver Stone is the one major country that Maduro&#8217;s insane antics have yet to alienate.</p>
<blockquote><p>Major Venezuelan newspaper El Nacional reports that the nation’s Minister of Communications and Information Delcy Rodríguez confirmed the upcoming film on her Twitter account, and that the government is excited about the project because of Stone’s previously “very affable” depiction of Chávez in the documentary South of the Border</p></blockquote>
<p>Sure. It let Oliver Stone combine his two favorite hobbies; Communism and cocaine.</p>
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		<title>Every Time Oliver Stone Writes About History, History Dies</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/every-time-oliver-stone-writes-about-history-history-dies/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=every-time-oliver-stone-writes-about-history-history-dies</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/every-time-oliver-stone-writes-about-history-history-dies/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 30 Oct 2013 15:40:44 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Communism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Oliver Stone]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=208918</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Oliver Stone is too stupid to be cynical]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/fidwf9.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-208922" alt="fidwf9" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/fidwf9-450x337.jpg" width="450" height="337" /></a></p>
<p>For some inexplicable reason <a href="http://hotair.com/headlines/archives/2013/10/28/the-myth-of-american-exceptionalism/">USA Today decided to give Oliver Stone some</a> column inches to spew Stalinist drivel that would have sent any Soviet apparatchik to the sink with three fingers in his mouth.</p>
<p>Sadly Oliver Stone is too stupid to be cynical. Too red and too brain dead to feel any shame when pounding out sentences like, &#8220;Whatever moral authority the United States gained for helping the Soviets defeat Germany in World War II.&#8221;</p>
<p>There are so many things wrong with that sentence, it&#8217;s almost hard to list them all. If anything it was the Soviets, former allies of Hitler, who helped the United States defeat Hitler. The Soviet Union was losing a war of attrition that it survived with the help of American supplies. The idea that Soviet troops could have singlehandedly made it to Berlin without a western front is worth less than the leftover cocaine in Stone&#8217;s vest pocket.</p>
<p>Worse still, Oliver Stone thinks that the United States gained moral authority from turning over Eastern Europe to brutal dictatorships, rather than from the liberation of Western Europe.</p>
<p>But that&#8217;s just one sentence and Stone has a million of them. Or dozens at any rate.</p>
<p>Here&#8217;s another one. &#8220;The U.S. invasion of Vietnam is the most egregious case of external aggression by any nation in the post-WWII era.&#8221;</p>
<p>The only way to characterize Vietnam as an external aggression is by assuming that the Communists were the rightful rulers of Vietnam. Clearly Stone makes that assumption. But even if we take that ugly idea as a given, we are also supposed to assume that the Vietnam War was more egregious than the Soviet interventions in Hungary or Czechoslovakia or the Chinese atrocities in Tibet.</p>
<p>Clearly Oliver Stone thinks so, which tells you all you need to know about what a warped mind we&#8217;re dealing with here.</p>
<blockquote><p>The Vietnam Memorial Wall in D.C. contains the names of 58,272 Americans who died in the war. Its message is that the tragedy of that wretched war was that 58,000 Americans died. The wall is 146 feet long.</p>
<p>Imagine a wall that also contained the names of all the Vietnamese, Cambodians, Laotians, and others who died. Such a wall would be over 4 miles long. It would not only be a fitting memorial to all the victims of &#8220;American exceptionalism,&#8221; it would be a perfect tombstone for that most dangerous of American myths.</p></blockquote>
<p>If Oliver Stone is fond of walls, what about a wall with all the Russians, Chinese and Cambodians, Cubans, North Koreans, Vietnamese and others who died under Communism?</p>
<p>At approximately 100 million names, that wall would be 100 miles long. It would be a fitting memorial to Oliver Stone&#8217;s politics and the myth that the left is exceptional in anything but mass murder.</p>
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		<title>Untold History of the USSR</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/lloyd-billingsley/untold-history-of-the-ussr/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=untold-history-of-the-ussr</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/lloyd-billingsley/untold-history-of-the-ussr/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 13 Mar 2013 04:38:56 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Lloyd Billingsley]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[neo-communist]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Oliver Stone]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Stalin]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[untold history]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[USSR]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=180984</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The backstory to Oliver Stone’s neo-communist encyclopedia.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/lloyd-billingsley/untold-history-of-the-ussr/osb/" rel="attachment wp-att-181174"><img class=" wp-image-181174 alignleft" title="osb" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/osb.gif" alt="" width="280" height="280" /></a><em>The Untold History of the United States, </em>by Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick, weighs in at 750 pages, an elephantine encyclopedia of neo-communist demonology. None of it is “untold” and on every page one hears the sound of a barrel being scraped. David Horowitz rightly called it <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/david-horowitz/oliver-stones-unbelievable-crap/">“unbelievable crap</a>,” but some readers might profit from an examination of the places where the book most needs stool softener and a polygraph test.</p>
<p>This must be the only book endorsed by Bill Maher, Daniel Ellsberg, and Mikhail Gorbachev, which makes sense. The only hero is former vice president Henry Wallace, the Progressive Party candidate for president of the United States in 1948. He’s portrayed here as a kind of American Gorbachev, the only hope to save the United States which, by setting off atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, “once again, proved itself unready to provide the kind of leadership a desperate world cried out for.”</p>
<p>The authors tout Wallace’s “Century of the Common Man,” but fail to note that, as one observer put it, Wallace’s Communist backers confused the Common Man with the Comintern. That organization does not appear in the book, which contains material about the USSR, Stalin, Communism and such.</p>
<p>The Nazi-Soviet Pact does appear but consider the treatment of the 1939 alliance that started World War II. It was an “unsavory deal,” Stalin struck with Hitler because he feared a “German-Polish alliance” to attack the USSR. It was actually to divide up Europe and crush the democracies, but that’s how Stalin and his echo-chamber spun it.</p>
<p>True to form, <em>Untold History</em> lists only two atrocities for Stalin, the massacre of Polish officers in the Katyn forest and “having the Red Army stop on the banks of the Vistula while the Germans put down the Warsaw uprising.” Nothing about the genocide noted in the <em>Black Book of Communism</em> and, more recently, Timothy Snyder’s <em>Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin</em>. The authors even include a photo of Russians mourning Stalin, who at the time of his death in 1953 was about to unleash terror on Soviet Jews, then slandered as “rootless cosmopolitans.”</p>
<p>As Ronald Radosh and Joyce Milton noted in <em>The Rosenberg File, </em>American Communists Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were responsible for giving nuclear weapons to the worst mass murder in history. Here they are only “accused atomic spies.” Stone and Kuznick tout “the legendary Communist-backed Abraham Lincoln Brigade,” but ignore the real story of this Stalinist militia as outlined in Cecil Eby’s <em>Comrades and Commissars</em>.</p>
<p>Stone and Kuznick are not eager to explain what American Stalinists were up to during the Nazi-Soviet Pact. Readers will not learn that they worked in concert with pro-Nazi organizations against the allies, particularly Britain. They picketed the White House and called FDR a “warmonger,” a charge the authors apply to virtually all U.S. Presidents, particularly Reagan, whose chapter is subtitled “Death Squads for Democracy.” No moral equivalence here. In <em>Untold History</em>, the USSR is the peaceful regime.</p>
<p>After World War II the USSR “had no blueprint for postwar Sovietization of Eastern Europe and hoped to maintain friendly and collaborative relations with its wartime allies.” Further, the Soviets “had gone out of their way to guarantee West Berliners’ access to food and coal from the eastern zone or from direct Soviet provisions.” So the heroic Berlin airlift touted in American schools was all for nothing.</p>
<p>The USSR oppressed half or Europe for nearly half a century, smashed reform in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, and later invaded Afghanistan. Yet CIA director William Casey’s picture of a “hostile, expansionist USSR” was “an image that didn’t accord with the facts.” And in the1983 the Soviets “mistakenly took a Korean Air Lines passenger jet for a spy plane.”</p>
<p>Thus, the Soviets make “mistakes” and are evaluated by their alleged aspiration for a better world. The United States, on the other hand, commits crimes and is evaluated on the authors’ vision of its record. The USA emerges here as an evil empire eager to spread tyranny and crush the poor by any means necessary. But consider the untold backstory here.</p>
<p>Hollywood leftists, Richard Grenier once observed, charge that America and capitalism are evil – except for their three-picture deal, except for their bank account, except for their Bel-Air mansion, except for their BMW and Mercedes-Benz. So despite <em>JFK</em>, <em>Wall Street</em>, and <em>The Untold History of the United States</em>, Oliver Stone does after all believe in American exceptionalism.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank">Click here</a>.  </strong></p>
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		<title>Oliver Stone&#8217;s Bush Derangement Syndrome</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/matthew-vadum/oliver-stones-bush-derangement/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=oliver-stones-bush-derangement</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/matthew-vadum/oliver-stones-bush-derangement/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 06 Feb 2013 04:40:13 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Matthew Vadum]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[9/11]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Bush]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Clinton]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[George H.W.]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[George W]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Oliver Stone]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Terrorism]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=176535</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The neo-Communist filmmaker presents yet another perversion of history.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/matthew-vadum/oliver-stones-bush-derangement/image4712295/" rel="attachment wp-att-176545"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-176545" title="image4712295" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/image4712295.jpg" alt="" width="297" height="260" /></a><em>Editor’s note: The following is the ninth 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 9 of the series.</em></p>
<p><em></em>George W. Bush schemed and plotted to become virtually an American emperor long before becoming president in 2001, according to neo-Communist movie-maker Oliver Stone.</p>
<p>Working with various shady so-called neoconservatives, Bush clawed his way into the Oval Office so he could impose his will on the world. The 43rd president used every unethical means at his disposal to achieve his unsavory objectives, Stone&#8217;s audience is told in the ninth episode of his multi-part hateful assault on modern American history, <em>Untold History of the United States</em>.</p>
<p>Moreover, as Stone sees it, the U.S. cheated to win the Cold War. George H.W. Bush cheated by using unfair campaign tactics against Michael Dukakis. George W. Bush and the Supreme Court cheated Al Gore out of the presidency. Bill Clinton, literally a serial sexual cheater, cheated Americans out of a &#8220;peace dividend.&#8221;</p>
<p>The episode is chock full of the kind of sweeping statements, outright lies, sleazy tabloid-worthy innuendos, and sloppy research we&#8217;ve come to expect from the pretentious movie director who has always shown a callous disdain for the facts.</p>
<p>Just about the only thing that is accurate in the episode is its name, &#8220;Bush and Clinton: Peace Squandered &#8212; the New World Order,&#8221; which correctly describes the episode&#8217;s theme. Like his popular conspiracy film, <em>JFK</em>, the episode is largely fiction.</p>
<p>Let&#8217;s examine the story-lines of the episode in order.</p>
<p><strong>Gorbymania</strong></p>
<p>Contrary to pro-American propaganda, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush didn&#8217;t contribute to ending the Cold War, according to Stone.</p>
<p>Soviet dictator Mikhail Gorbachev, a Communist who was fighting to preserve Soviet Communism, gets all the credit. Gushing, Stone declares that around the time the Berlin Wall fell, &#8220;the world was a hopeful, even joyous place. Protracted and bloody wars were ending in Afghanistan, Angola, Cambodia, Nicaragua, and between Iran and Iraq.&#8221;</p>
<p>In this magical time of rainbows and unicorns, Gorbachev took it upon himself to ask the member states of the United Nations &#8220;for joint action to eliminate the threat to the world&#8217;s environment.&#8221; At the end of 1988, Gorbachev demanded that weapons be banned in outer space and that Third World exploitation be ended. &#8220;He called for a UN-brokered ceasefire in Afghanistan and offered a joint effort to put an end to an era of wars, the terror of hunger and poverty and the tactic of political terrorism,&#8221; Stone boasts.</p>
<p>Echoing the <em>New York Times</em>, which hailed Gorbachev as a visionary world leader, Stone ecstatically praises the Communist&#8217;s proposals as &#8220;breathtaking, risky, bold, naive, heroic.&#8221;</p>
<p>George H.W. Bush, on the other hand, was a vicious, dimwitted blue-blood. Like the media before him, the director distorts the 41st president&#8217;s much ridiculed reference to the &#8220;vision thing.&#8221; He maintains it meant the president &#8220;distrusted individualistic thinking.&#8221;</p>
<p>This is nonsense, of course. Bush was ridiculing the idea that a presidential candidate had to have a distinct vision, as conservatives had argued in his day. Bush thought he could win by convincing the public he was a competent manager, without laying out a comprehensive platform. The fact that he was elected suggests he was on to something.</p>
<p>Stone accuses Bush of race-baiting during the 1988 campaign. &#8220;Like Nixon, Bush appealed to voters&#8217; racism and fears of crime.&#8221; He &#8220;openly played the race card with a campaign ad&#8221; about the furloughed black murderer Willie Horton, who went on a crime spree after being released in Massachusetts under then-governor Michael Dukakis.</p>
<p>It&#8217;s difficult to believe the ad that painted Dukakis as soft on crime was racist. The Willie Horton issue was first raised earlier in the election cycle by then-Sen. Al Gore (D-Tenn.) in his run for the Democratic nomination against Dukakis.</p>
<p>Ensconced in the Oval Office, Bush and his advisers didn&#8217;t fight fair against the dear Soviet leader, Stone complains.</p>
<p>&#8220;They all agreed reaching out to Gorbachev would weaken Western resolve where Gorbachev was calling for eliminating tactical nuclear weapons in Europe, a move, an offer most Europeans applauded,&#8221; Stone says. &#8220;The United States countered that the Soviet Union should remove 325,000 troops in exchange for a U.S. cut of 30,000.&#8221;</p>
<p>Most Americans would consider Bush&#8217;s offer an example of driving a hard bargain against the nation&#8217;s sworn enemy, but Stone regards it as some kind of betrayal.</p>
<p>The U.S. should have entered into a grand alliance with the Soviet Union, according to the Kremlin-adoring director. &#8220;The laurels of victory and a true peace would be squandered &#8230; in Bush&#8217;s lack of foresight and vision in acquiring a true ally in the Soviet Union.&#8221;</p>
<p>Stone implies that because Bush refused to give Gorbachev political cover to help him deal with hardliners at home, the Soviet strongman was placed under house arrest in mid-1991 by Communist officials.</p>
<p>Bush&#8217;s refusal to appease Gorbachev, who was struggling to reform the USSR while maintaining a socialist system, led to the Soviet leader&#8217;s downfall. &#8220;Condemned and rejected, on Christmas Day 1991 Gorbachev, one of the most visionary and transformative leaders of the twentieth century resigned in a form of disgrace,&#8221; Stone says somberly.</p>
<p>As U.S. president, Bill Clinton was an improvement in certain ways over Bush 41, Stone emphasizes. The neo-Communist film-maker recycles the popular <a href="http://finance.townhall.com/columnists/craigsteiner/2011/08/22/the_clinton_surplus_myth/page/full/">left-wing lie</a> that when his presidency came to a close, Clinton &#8220;left behind a temporarily prosperous country with a huge surplus.&#8221;</p>
<p>But Clinton was a warmonger just like his predecessor, the director claims. Although the United States faced &#8220;no clear threat from hostile nations,&#8221; the Clinton administration was &#8220;even more tough-minded on defense than their Republican adversaries.&#8221; Tough-guy Clinton, of course, repeatedly failed to give the order to shoot when Osama bin Laden was in U.S. cross-hairs.</p>
<p>Clinton squandered the much vaunted &#8220;peace dividend&#8221; that America supposedly had coming because it no longer had to spend great sums to defend itself from the world&#8217;s other superpower:</p>
<blockquote><p>In January 2000 his administration added <em>$115 million</em> to the Pentagon&#8217;s projected five-year defense plan. It continued spending profusely on missile defense. Clinton also refused to sign the Ottawa land mines treaty and oversaw a significant increase in U.S. arms sales to almost 60 percent of the world&#8217;s market by 1997.</p></blockquote>
<p>According to Stone&#8217;s fuzzy math, a mere $115 million increase in missile defense spending constitutes a spending spree. The Department of Defense&#8217;s actual budget in fiscal 2000 was more than a quarter <em>trillion</em> dollars.</p>
<p><strong>The Bushes Stole the Election</strong></p>
<p>Stone rehashes the tired old smear that the Bush family stole the 2000 presidential election by somehow rigging the vote in all-important Florida. Regurgitating what has become an article of faith on the Left, Stone declares the election &#8220;the most scandalous in U.S. history.&#8221;</p>
<p>To support his claim of Republican corruption, Stone literally invents facts. After correctly stating that Democrat Al Gore beat George W. Bush in the national popular vote by 540,000 votes, he insinuates that racial discrimination prevented Gore from winning Florida.</p>
<p>According to Stone, Gore lost Florida &#8220;when more than 10 percent of African-Americans were disqualified by an antiquated state voting system overseen by a Florida governor, Jeb Bush, George&#8217;s younger brother, and Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris, Bush&#8217;s state campaign manager.&#8221;</p>
<p>Stone doesn&#8217;t say how he knows more than one tenth of black voters were removed from Florida voter rolls, a conspiracy theory that emerged from the fever swamps of the Left during the recount. Could these disqualified African-Americans have been ineligible felons? We don&#8217;t know because the film-maker doesn&#8217;t bother to explain.</p>
<p>It is fanciful for Stone to assert that Florida&#8217;s voting system was run by Jeb Bush and Katherine Harris. As anyone who lived through the 36-day recount saga in 2000 knows, the governor and secretary of state don&#8217;t exert much control over polling places. Those are administered at the local level by turf-conscious, stubborn county officials.</p>
<p>Stone&#8217;s conspiracy-theorizing is even more explicit in the companion book, co-written with <a href="http://www.american.edu/cas/faculty/kuznick.cfm">Peter Kuznick</a>, a real-life associate professor of history at American University. (Given that Kuznick is contributing to a book that ought to be subtitled <em>Anti-Americanism For Dummies</em>, he can&#8217;t be overly concerned about being taken seriously.)</p>
<p>Poor Vice President Al Gore was doomed from the outset, according to the book:</p>
<blockquote><p>&#8220;The deck was stacked against Gore &#8230; Partial recounts cut Bush&#8217;s lead below 600 votes. Fearing that the full state recount would sink him, Bush deployed family consigliere James Baker, his father&#8217;s campaign manager and secretary of state, to use every available court challenge to block the recount.&#8221;</p></blockquote>
<p>Long a believer that the U.S. invaded Iraq for oil, Stone breaks out a violin and plays his corporate conspiracy/war for oil <em>leitmotif</em>. Some campaign staffers flew down to Florida for the recount on corporate jets lent to the campaign by Bush&#8217;s &#8220;friend&#8221; Ken Lay of Enron infamy and Dick &#8220;Cheney&#8217;s friends at Halliburton.&#8221; Stone doesn&#8217;t mention the thousands of Democratic lawyers who rushed down to Florida in November 2000 to advocate for Gore.</p>
<p>Gore &#8220;demanded&#8221; a &#8220;full state recount&#8221; and the Bush campaign fought that demand, Stone writes. (Kindle version of book, Location 10971 of 22715)</p>
<p>It&#8217;s a bald-faced lie.</p>
<p>Gore&#8217;s strategy was to harvest extra votes in Democratic strongholds alone. He sought manual recounts in the four heavily Democratic counties of Volusia, Palm Beach, Broward, and Miami-Dade. Florida&#8217;s state supreme court futilely ordered a statewide recount on its own, acting so late in the game that it probably couldn&#8217;t have been done properly without missing federal deadlines.</p>
<p>In the documentary, the director glibly attributes Bush&#8217;s eventual win to a corrupt high court in Washington:</p>
<blockquote><p>&#8220;Behooving the shenanigans of a banana republic, the U.S. Supreme Court, without precedent, surprisingly intervened in the Florida election process and voted 5 to 4 to stop a recount, thus handing Bush the election. The majority of these justices had been appointed in administrations in which Bush&#8217;s father was either president or vice president. If it had happened in another country it would have been denounced as a coup by the United States.&#8221;</p></blockquote>
<p>In fact, the high court voted 5 to 4 in <em>Bush v. Gore</em> to halt the recount ordered by the Florida Supreme Court after it had already decided in a lopsided 7 to 2 vote that the vote-counting processes in place were so fundamentally unfair that they violated the Constitution&#8217;s Equal Protection Clause. On that equal-treatment issue liberal justices Stephen Breyer and David Souter concurred with the majority.</p>
<p>Of course it is true, as Stone notes, that the high court was dominated by justices appointed when George W. Bush&#8217;s father was president or vice president. But that by itself proves nothing. After the elder Bush served 12 years in the Executive Branch, it isn&#8217;t surprising that courts would abound with his appointees or the appointees of the two-term president he served under.</p>
<p>Years later, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia <a href="http://www.callawyer.com/clstory.cfm?pubdt=NaN&amp;eid=913358&amp;evid=1">denied suggestions</a> that the high court had injected itself into the 2000 election. &#8220;Nobody on the court liked to wade into that controversy,&#8221; Scalia said. &#8220;But there was certainly no way that we could turn down the petition for certiorari. What are you going to say? The case isn&#8217;t important enough?&#8221;</p>
<p>In the end, the U.S. Supreme Court merely produced the same election result that would have been reached had it not interrupted the Florida recount. And after much drama, the system devised by the Framers of the Constitution worked.</p>
<p>Eventually even the mainstream media &#8211;gasp!&#8211; agreed that Bush was the legitimate victor.</p>
<p>A year after the election, an exhaustive investigation by a large consortium of mainstream media outlets concluded that &#8220;George W. Bush would have won even if the United States Supreme Court had allowed the statewide manual recount of the votes that the Florida Supreme Court had ordered to go forward.&#8221; (<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/12/politics/12VOTE.html?pagewanted=all">New York Times</a>, Nov. 12, 2001)</p>
<p>Stone ignores the inconvenient fact that had the U.S. Supreme Court not acted, other political institutions were prepared to step in. (He also overlooks the hordes of left-wing activists who pressured electors pledged to Bush to become &#8220;faithless&#8221; electors by voting against him in the Electoral College.)</p>
<p>To prevent Gore from stealing the election in Florida, the Republican-controlled state legislature had been ready to approve Bush&#8217;s slate of presidential electors over Gore&#8217;s, handing the election to Bush. Similarly, if the election had been thrown to the Republican-controlled U.S. House of Representatives, Bush would also have been elected.</p>
<p>But Stone, like the entire Left, can simply never accept that Gore, whom he describes as &#8220;a forward-looking, experienced man who repeatedly warned of a world ecological disaster looming in a changing climate that needed controlling,&#8221; could ever lose to a supposed rube from tumble weed-covered Texas.</p>
<p>Stone fantasizes that Gore was compassionate and as such might have been a truly great president. It is &#8220;compassion for the other that in the end has distinguished our greatest leaders, be it Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, Roosevelt, or on other fronts, people such as Martin Luther King.&#8221;</p>
<p>The America-hater suggests that if Clinton&#8217;s veep hadn&#8217;t supposedly been so unfairly roughed up by a mocking media, the community of nations might have come together in a giant group hug after 9/11:</p>
<blockquote><p>&#8220;Had Al Gore been in office, instead of being derided by the media as a know-it-all who annoyed them might he not have emotionally connected to a world that had hardened in its hatred of U.S. policies? Might he not have acted in humbler fashion and pursued the terrorists with the traditional structures of diplomacy, intelligence services, and firm police action? Would not the same results have been achieved without making new enemies that could be perceived as martyrs to a young generation of emerging radicals?&#8221;</p></blockquote>
<p>We&#8217;ll never know for sure.</p>
<p><strong>Bush the Younger, the Mad Tyrant</strong></p>
<p>Stone characterizes George W. Bush, forever an illegitimate president in his eyes, as a decadent tyrant. After taking office and &#8220;befitting a Roman emperor,&#8221; the 43rd president was &#8220;surrounded by an entourage of true believers.&#8221;</p>
<p>Although President George H.W. Bush and President Clinton worked at diplomacy and coalition-building in the international area, the younger, twisted Bush had psychological issues with his father that guided his actions in the Oval Office, Stone claims. &#8220;In his sense of defiance towards his father, [Bush 43] came to resemble more a degenerate heir to an admired Roman emperor.&#8221;</p>
<p>As invented facts spring forth from his fertile imagination, Stone pontificates that, &#8220;In Bush&#8217;s mind both his father and the sexually undisciplined Bill Clinton were weak. Ronald Reagan was his idea of strength and a higher father.&#8221;</p>
<p>The cheap shots at Bush continue. Unable to take in the scope of history without the lens of cinema, the director relies on a box office blockbuster to advance his lunatic theories. It was ironic, he says, that in early 2001, Ridley Scott&#8217;s <em>Gladiator</em> was named best film of 2000. The movie, which enjoyed &#8220;worldwide success celebrated Rome&#8217;s harsh militarism depicting a perverted leadership that spelled the fall of the Roman Empire,&#8221; really seemed to be telling the story of the ongoing collapse of increasingly militaristic, imperialistic America, Stone infers.</p>
<p>We are then shown a dramatic clip from <em>Gladiator</em>, in which the conflicted son Commodus, having just learned he will not become emperor, murders his father Marcus Aurelius to seize his throne. &#8220;I would butcher the whole world if you would only love me!&#8221; a distraught Commodus cries out as he squeezes the life out of the elderly emperor.</p>
<p>Having metaphorically killed his father, or something, Bush 43 soon turned into a monster the likes of which the American body politic had never seen before &#8212; in Stone&#8217;s morbid fantasy world. Aligned with devious &#8220;neoconservatives,&#8221; Bush set about doing pro-American things that the conservative movement had long supported.</p>
<p>Under Bush, the litany of supposed horrors committed included asserting U.S. sovereignty by withdrawing from the International Criminal Court Treaty, rejecting the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, repudiating the worse-than-useless Kyoto Protocol on Global Warming, disavowing the so-called Middle East peace process, and suspending negotiations with Stalinist North Korea on its long-range missile program.</p>
<p>Even worse, Bush dared to make an effort to provide American energy security, Stone pouts. &#8220;His administration was marinated in oil, [Vice President Dick] Cheney putting together a highly secretive energy task force that laid out plans to control the world&#8217;s supply.&#8221;</p>
<p>Stone inadvertently reveals that he must not have watched television news for a decade, making the ridiculous claim that &#8220;in general the media asked few questions about these abrupt reversals in policy.&#8221;</p>
<p><strong>9/11 As An Opportunity</strong></p>
<p>Stone blames Bush for failing to prevent the Islamofascist terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The threats made by Osama bin Laden were known by authorities but Stone claims the president &#8220;could not focus his attention as he spent more time away from Washington than any recent president at his sequestered Crawford, Texas ranch chopping wood.&#8221;</p>
<p>In his rush to condemn Bush, Stone skips over the fact that because of the long delay in resolving the election, well into 2001 many top security posts in the administration went unfilled. The fact is also left out that the Democrat-erected &#8220;<a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/viewSubCategory.asp?id=182">Gorelick wall</a>&#8221; prevented intelligence agencies from piecing together data gathered about the impending attacks.</p>
<p>Following the deadly attacks in which roughly 3,000 Americans were killed, Bush fanned the flames of public hysteria, Stone alleges.</p>
<p>After 9/11 in America:</p>
<blockquote><p>&#8220;an enormous Pandora&#8217;s box of dark energy and pent-up fear of chaos reminiscent of the late nineteenth-century French Revolution all came together in self-righteousness that would spawn a crusade against not only bin Laden and his followers but all evil in the world itself.&#8221;</p></blockquote>
<p>This makes no sense. Although in his rhetoric Bush identified a three-country &#8220;Axis of Evil&#8221; and attacked Iraq, one of those nations, the Global War on Terror he initiated never actually aimed at eradicating all evil in the world. This campaign was narrowly directed at state sponsors of terrorism.</p>
<p>Besides, Stone&#8217;s historical analogy is a head-scratcher. There was no French Revolution near the end of the nineteenth century. Civilized people the world over-stared in disbelief at the actual French Revolution, an ugly, blood-drenched eruption of sociopolitical tumult that raged at the very end of the <em>eighteenth century</em> (i.e. 1789 to 1799) and whose reverberations continue echoing in the present day.</p>
<p>Strangely, Stone is referring to the Paris Commune of 1871, which only a few have called the Fourth French Revolution. We know Stone is pointing to the events of 1871 because during the relevant part of his narration he displays <a href="http://www.parisenimages.fr/fr/popup-photo.html?photo=1543-1">a period print</a> of Communards fighting at the barricades.</p>
<p>The problem is that the Occupy Wall Street-like uprising of anarchists and communists lasted only two months and didn&#8217;t spread beyond the French capital. Although it inspired generations of Marxists, the Paris Commune is more of an interesting historical footnote than a real revolution.</p>
<p>In any event, as a neo-Communist, Stone would have to applaud the Paris Commune. As V.I. Lenin <a href="http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/staterev/ch03.htm">noted</a>, Karl Marx himself applauded the uprising at the time, expressing hope that at some point revolutionaries would &#8220;smash&#8221; France&#8217;s &#8220;bureaucratic-military machine.&#8221;</p>
<p>Because this error-prone, America-hating director can&#8217;t be bothered to explain his argument properly, it&#8217;s not clear what he is getting at. Perhaps the significance of the reference was lost on Stone&#8217;s cutting room floor.</p>
<p>Stone insists that in the aftermath of 9/11, when nations acted with empathy towards the U.S., Bush squandered an opportunity to reach out to the rest of the world.</p>
<p>But Stone can&#8217;t even get country names right. &#8220;Vladimir Putin of the <em>USSR</em> was one of the first to offer help,&#8221; Stone says. Putin&#8217;s offer came in 2001, when he was president of Russia, a decade after the Soviet Union disbanded.</p>
<p>Putin, by the way, was the right kind of strongman to rescue Russia, says the director. Putin &#8220;brought Russia back from the brink by reinstating a strong tyrannical centralizing power in the old Russian style.&#8221; Of course in reality Russia is still on the brink, its population plummeting amidst a perpetually stagnant economy, but Stone never lets facts get in the way of dictator-worship.</p>
<p>Bush 43 had planned his drive for world domination long before becoming president, according to Stone:</p>
<blockquote><p>&#8220;As he embarked on one of the country&#8217;s most ambitious periods of nation-building, George Bush actually did more in his eight years in office than any other president to bury the World War Two myth of American power moderated by fairness. In hindsight it was his capacity to conceal his reactionary intentions that years later still confronts and shocks many Americans from the pre-2001 era.&#8221;</p></blockquote>
<p>There you have it. The ups and downs of American life for the past 12 years may be directly traced to a sinister plot hatched in smoke-filled back rooms in Kennebunkport and Austin.</p>
<p>So says Hollywood&#8217;s most prolific neo-Communist conspiracy theorist.</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’s review of “<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>” the 6th episode.</p>
<p>9. Larry Schweikart’s review of “<a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/larry-schweikart/a-history-lesson-for-oliver-stone-on-vietnam/">Johnson, Nixon &amp; Vietnam: Reversal of Fortune</a>,” the 7th episode.</p>
<p>10. Daniel Greenfield&#8217;s review of “<a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/the-death-of-oliver-stones-good-soviet-union/">Reagan, Gorbachev &amp; the Third World: Revival of Fortune</a>,” the 8th 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>
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		<title>The Death of Oliver Stone’s Good Soviet Union</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/the-death-of-oliver-stones-good-soviet-union/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-death-of-oliver-stones-good-soviet-union</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 29 Jan 2013 04:50:25 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Cold War]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Gorbachev]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Oliver Stone]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Reagan]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Showtime]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[untold history]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=174580</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[How a neo-Communist filmmaker learned to stop worrying and hate history.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/the-death-of-oliver-stones-good-soviet-union/ronald-reagan-gorbachev/" rel="attachment wp-att-175323"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-175323" title="ronald-reagan-gorbachev" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/ronald-reagan-gorbachev.jpg" alt="" width="290" height="198" /></a><em>Editor’s note: The following is the eighth 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 8 of the series.</em></p>
<p>In episode 8 of Oliver Stone&#8217;s Untold History of the United State, Stone says:</p>
<p>&#8220;Right wing forces have always operated freely and openly in the dark chasms of American life where racism, militarism, imperialism and blind devotion to private enterprise festered.&#8221;</p>
<p>Accompanying this is footage from Birth of a Nation. A film that Thomas Dixon Jr., author of “The Clansman”, the book that it was based on, screened for President Woodrow Wilson with the intention that it &#8220;would transform every man in the audience into a good Democrat!&#8221; Following that is footage of American soldiers marching off to WWI under a Democratic president. The choice of footage once again reminds us that Oliver Stone&#8217;s knowledge of history is as scrambled as his brain.</p>
<p>Over this confused juxtaposition of history, the narration goes on to inform us that the same forces that spawned the Nazi Party and the McCarthyites, a group that included Robert F. Kennedy, also created the Tea Party. It&#8217;s a reminder that the difference between Oliver Stone&#8217;s &#8220;Untold History of the United States&#8221; and a YouTube conspiracy video about the Freemasons is that the latter doesn&#8217;t have a slot on Showtime. Yet.</p>
<p>Topping all that, the soporific narration, borrowed from a PBS special, which just classed together Adolf Hitler, RFK, Woodrow Wilson and Michele Bachmann, goes on to accuse these &#8220;dark forces&#8221; of being ignorant of history. And we&#8217;re less than 3 minutes into the madness that is Episode 8 of the worst thing that Showtime has ever aired. And that includes Piranha and Scream 4.</p>
<p>Episode 8, &#8220;Reagan, Gorbachev &amp; the Third World: Revival of Fortune,&#8221; begins by reimagining Nixon as a progressive who established the EPA, supported the ERA and strengthened the Voting Rights Act. The logic of this might make more sense if the Nixon Administration hadn&#8217;t just been described as being on a mission to move America far to the right.</p>
<p>But consistency doesn&#8217;t matter to Oliver Stone. Within 40 seconds, Nixon goes from an ally of the KKK to a civil rights leader, just to set up the omnipresent claim that the next Republican president was the one to really move the Republican Party to the right. This is the reality-free narrative that the left constantly embraces, but it has never been quite as reality-free as it is in the hands of America&#8217;s leading reality-free filmmaker.</p>
<p>6 minutes in and the vast right-wing conspiracy is on the table. &#8220;Nixon&#8217;s rage had become their own,&#8221; the narrator whispers. This rage was apparently expressed by creating think-tanks like Heritage and AEI promoting deregulation and privatization; probably the least angry example of rage in the entire history of anger.</p>
<p>&#8220;The moneyed class,&#8221; the narrator hisses, like a low-rent Marxist, &#8220;were back.&#8221; They had apparently gone off to vacation on Martha&#8217;s Vineyard and hobnob with the Kennedys, but now they were back and angrily creating think-tanks.</p>
<p>Carter ushers in a brief period of idealistic utopia, complete with appeasement of the USSR, but then the camera zooms to Zbigniew Brzezinski. Ominous music plays. The Trilateral Commission logo appears on the screen while the narrator informs us about its conspiracies on behalf of the “World Capitalist Order.” And we&#8217;re back in YouTube territory.</p>
<p>Like most conspiracy theorists, Stone is sloppy. He spends a minute on the Trilateral Commission and then pretends that the American Embassy was seized because the Shah had been admitted to the US for medical treatment. It&#8217;s silly, but that&#8217;s what history as a Neo-Communist conspiracy cartoon looks like.</p>
<p>Every Anti-American country and group, whether it&#8217;s the USSR invading Afghanistan or the Iranians taking American hostages, is depicted as careful and forbearing. On the other side of the ocean however, Uncle Sam stomps around in cowboy boots guzzling the blood of the oppressed like cheap whiskey.</p>
<p>The Soviet Union wanted peace and therefore had no choice but to invade Afghanistan. While the United States undermined the Soviet Union and backed Islamic militants, which led, we are told, to September 11.</p>
<p>&#8220;The Untold History of the United States&#8221; is full of such overreaching generalizations, but short on historical detail. No distinction is made between the Arab fighters and the Afghan fighters that the United States was supporting. No mention is made of the fact that the Soviet Union ruthlessly and brutally murdered its own puppet in a senseless assault. Basic pieces of information like that have no place in Oliver Stone&#8217;s expensive Showtime YouTube video.</p>
<p>Episode 8 depicts Reagan as an ignorant buffoon. Carter&#8217;s evil anti-Communist puppet master was Brzezinski. Reagan&#8217;s evil puppet master turns out to be William Casey, a man so awful that the narrator informs us, while serial killer music plays, that he had multiple statues of the Virgin Mary in his Long Island mansion.</p>
<p>Casey believed that the USSR was involved in international terrorism; the narrator however gravely informs us that the Soviets actually disapproved of international terrorism. Such a claim barely had any justification being made in the 80s. After the fall of the USSR, when there are volumes of documents listing the amounts of money and types of training that the KGB provided to terrorist groups, it&#8217;s just a naked lie.</p>
<p>The Sandinistas are heroes and the Contras are villains, along with every leftist gang in Latin America. To prove his point, Stone rolls footage from his own movie, Salvador, as we&#8217;re treated to James Woods emoting in a fictional movie that Stone seems unable to distinguish from the real thing.</p>
<p>And that&#8217;s just the beginning of the confusion. Hezbollah bombs the Marine barracks, and with no explanation for why the Marines were in Lebanon, the episode insists that Reagan then dispatched troops to Grenada to restore America&#8217;s wounded pride. That&#8217;s stupid even by leftist standards.</p>
<p>In Grenada, the narration informs us, using footage from Clint Eastwood&#8217;s Heartbreak Ridge, 19 soldiers were killed fighting &#8220;poorly armed Cuban construction workers.&#8221; Elsewhere Reagan oppresses poor air traffic controllers while throwing lavish parties, illustrated by footage from Heaven&#8217;s Gate, a movie about the 1890s. Most YouTube conspiracy videos are more plausible and have better narrative logic.</p>
<p>Still Stone must sooner or later explain the collapse of the Soviet Union. And he does this by painting Mikhail Gorbachev as the true hero, another Henry Wallace, who genuinely wanted peace and disarmament. Missile defense, we are told was a pipe dream, on a television show filmed in the age of Iron Dome. The USSR knew that SDI could never work, we are told, yet for some reason refused to make peace unless Reagan gave it up.</p>
<p>Gorbachev becomes the courageous visionary leader, while Reagan is just another puppet of the imperialistic American empire.</p>
<p>None of this is history. It’s barely even a conspiracy theory. It’s long, yet short on details, broken up into scrambled bits and illustrated with movie scenes to add even more unreality. None of it hangs together. All of it depends on accepting Stone’s premise that America is run by an evil conspiracy, but the rest of the world isn’t. If you accept that, then the story makes sense. If you question it, then it all falls apart.</p>
<p>The Untold History of the United States doesn’t depend on merely assuming moral equivalency between the US and the USSR, but the moral superiority of the USSR. That assumption is never backed up with facts. It’s innate in the story that we are told. It is a bias so baked in that Stone is incapable of recognizing his own logical flaws or the clumsiness of his storytelling. You either agree with him that the USSR was morally superior to the United States. Or you are a member of the vast right-wing conspiracy.</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’s review of “<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>” the 6th episode.</p>
<p>9. Larry Schweikart&#8217;s review of “<a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/larry-schweikart/a-history-lesson-for-oliver-stone-on-vietnam/">Johnson, Nixon &amp; Vietnam: Reversal of Fortune</a>,” the 7th episode.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<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>
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		<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>
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		<title>Neo-Communism Out of the Closet</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/david-horowitz/neo-communism-out-of-the-closet/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=neo-communism-out-of-the-closet</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 17 Jan 2013 04:58:42 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[David Horowitz]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Communism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Oliver Stone]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Progressive]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Untold History of the United States]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=173796</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The warm reception of Oliver Stone's Kremlin propaganda is a watershed moment in American politics.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/david-horowitz/neo-communism-out-of-the-closet/untold/" rel="attachment wp-att-173805"><img class=" wp-image-173805 alignleft" title="untold" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/untold.jpg" alt="" width="245" height="372" /></a>Oliver Stone’s <em>Untold History of the United States</em> is a ludicrous encapsulation of the Kremlin’s view of the Cold War, amplified by the Castro, Ho Chi Minh, Daniel Ortega, Hugo Chavez, Hamas version of the post-Communist decades. Indeed, America is portrayed by the Stone-Kuznick author-team as such an evil force in the events of the last 75 years, they evoke overt sympathy for the Germans and the Japanese during World War II, as well as for Stalin himself, and then for really any self-declared enemy of the United States, not excluding Saddam Hussein and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.</p>
<p>I consider the reception of this latest Stone travesty to be a significant cultural event signifying a final coming out of the closet of what can only be termed the Communist left. It is the well-known views of the Communist left that undeniably constitute the Stone-Kuznick version of the events of the last seventy years, and their portrait of the United States. The fact that Henry Wallace, the hero of their malevolent work, was a Communist and Soviet pawn, is a perfect summary of the pathetic Stalinism that is the heart and soul of the world-view of <em>Oliver Stone’s Untold History of the United States.</em></p>
<p>Some years ago I made a case for characterizing the progressive, liberal left, including the organizations that form the heart of the Democratic Party  &#8212; the government unions, the Soros Shadow Party, the Center for American Progress, and the Netroots activists – as “neo-Communists.” I made the argument for calling them neo-Communists on the basis of the fact that there was no discernible difference between the view these political actors took of American capitalism – corporations are evil, capitalism is bad, America is the great imperialist Satan – and the view taken by the Communists of the Stalin era.</p>
<p>Of course, time changes everyone somewhat. Even Communists like Khrushchev, who spearheaded Stalin’s purges, came to find it politically wise one day to be anti-Stalinists. So with the progressives. They may decry Communists who have been dead for fifty years but they are busily burnishing the Communists’ ideas and preserving their legacies and passing them on in the curricula of our schools and now on cable TV.</p>
<p>In light of these fairly obvious (if widely unspoken) facts, “neo-Communist” seemed to me an apt term to describe progressives and their liberal fellow-travelers. It seemed just as apt a term as, say, “neo-fascist” and more apt a term than “neo-conservative” (since even Norman Podhoretz says that neo-conservatism is no longer distinguishable from conservatism – although for Paul Gottfried and others that is undoubtedly a controversial statement).</p>
<p>What is striking about the Stone-Kuznick myth-making adventure, and the reason I am making these points once again, is its reception. The <em>Untold History</em> has been widely embraced by the leftwing academic establishment, by the Huffington Post pundits, by the <em>Dissent</em> historian, Michael Kazin, by <em>The Nation</em> and by the progressive culture generally (although not, be it said, the <em>New York Times</em>). Even more impressive has been the silence of the liberal lambs. This is in striking contrast to their reaction to the appearance of Stone’s equally awful <em>JFK.</em> When that piece of rot appeared twenty years ago, there were thunderous and near hysterical denunciations of its lies from leading Democratic Party figures. No such dissents have greeted Stone’s Stalinist revival, no outcries over the libels committed on the memories of Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, not to mention America.</p>
<p>I read this as concrete evidence that neo-Communism is alive and well and is now the heart of the progressive movement and the Democratic Party, at least its activist center. I would include in this category the president, his likely new Secretary of State, and his chief political advisors.</p>
<p>[After writing the above I sent it to a conservative academic listserv with the following query: I am interested in the list’s thoughts on this. I would ask one favor, however. Please don’t bring up the fact that few people are still talking about the “dictatorship of the proletariat” or “taking over the means of production” in those words, or identifying themselves as card carrying Communists. First, the left has a history of studied and disciplined mendacity in pursuit of its goals. Second, its goals shift with its accretions of power. Finally, it has been to school with Saul Alinsky (about whom I have written quite a bit) and has absorbed his two main lessons: lie about your agendas; and remember that the end – the destruction of American capitalism – justifies any means.</p>
<p>[There were no responses to my query. I then sent the list this observation: When I posted the question of whether the term "neo-Communist" is not appropriate to describe the current generation of "progressives" I suspected there would be no takers no matter how persuasive the case I made for such an appellation. And that suspicion has been confirmed. What I conclude from this is that the left -- the neo-Communist left if you will -- has been so successful in its ongoing campaign of political intimidation of any critics of its loyalties, allegiances and endorsement of views that are totalitarian in origin and result --  few are willing to risk even speculative thoughts on this matter. I think this is one of the most significant political problems that confronts anyone who wishes to raise his or her voice against this march to serfdom.]</p>
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		<title>Oliver Stone&#8217;s Distortion of the Eisenhower Era</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/matthew-vadum/oliver-stones-distortion-of-the-eisenhower-era/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=oliver-stones-distortion-of-the-eisenhower-era</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 16 Jan 2013 04:34:11 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Matthew Vadum]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Cold War]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Eisenhower]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Oliver Stone]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Showtime]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[untold history]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=173398</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Why the radical historical revisionist hates Ike.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/matthew-vadum/oliver-stones-distortion-of-the-eisenhower-era/eisenhower-wc/" rel="attachment wp-att-173407"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-173407" title="Eisenhower-WC" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Eisenhower-WC.png" alt="" width="265" height="209" /></a><em>Editor’s note: The following is the fifth 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.&#8221; 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 5 of the series.</em></p>
<p>President Dwight D. Eisenhower is responsible for transforming America into the imperialist global bully it supposedly is today, according to radical Hollywood fabulist Oliver Stone.</p>
<p>In the fifth episode of his multi-part revisionist assault on modern American history, <em>Untold History of the United States</em>, Stone argues that Eisenhower was a willing tool of greedy U.S. corporations and a warmonger who refused to make deals with a Soviet Union that was suing for peace.</p>
<p>Stone blames Eisenhower, the popular former five-star general who led the U.S. and its allies to victory in World War Two, for creating &#8220;a permanent war economy.&#8221; Essentially, Ike turned America into a high-tech modern-day Sparta, Stone claims, by permanently ramping up military expenditures. Of course to the extent that Eisenhower promoted high levels of defense spending he was only carrying on the policies of President Franklin Roosevelt. The Communist-loving director, known for palling around with Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez, could never forgive Eisenhower for deploying nuclear weapons that were aimed at Stone&#8217;s beloved USSR.</p>
<p>&#8220;Nuclear bombs were now the foundation of America&#8217;s empire and provided the new emperor, its president, with a mystical power that required more and more suffocating secrecy even if those powers went far beyond the original limits of executive power defined in the Constitution,&#8221; Stone says.</p>
<p>Of course the United States has never been an empire, but Stone&#8217;s Marxist worldview clouds his perception. Apart perhaps from its pursuit of &#8220;manifest destiny&#8221; and a few military adventures in the 1800s, when the U.S. has projected its power beyond its home territory it has eventually pulled back.</p>
<p>The U.S., unlike so many world powers, does not conquer other countries: it liberates them and then goes home. This has, understandably, given the U.S. a special moral standing in the community of nations and it certainly does not make the American president an emperor.</p>
<p>But Stone&#8217;s unpatriotic rant continues. America&#8217;s nuclear arsenal and the pricey infrastructure supporting it allowed the imperialistic U.S. to dominate the world for decades, he insists. &#8220;And although the bombs themselves were not expensive, the huge infrastructure was, requiring bases in the U.S. and abroad and enormous delivery systems by bomber, missile, aircraft carrier, and submarine.&#8221;</p>
<p>America wasn&#8217;t threatening the free world; it was shielding it with its nuclear umbrella. This is not the behavior of a ruthless conqueror state.</p>
<p>Stone continues attacking Eisenhower, claiming that he planted the seeds for later &#8220;blowback&#8221; against the U.S. by intervening in the affairs of countries such as Iran. The Islamic revolution of 1979 that transformed that country from a U.S. ally to a hostile totalitarian theocracy was a long time coming. The revolution was an explosion of pent-up hostility, a delayed reaction to the U.S.- and U.K.-backed 1953 ouster of Iran&#8217;s socialist prime minister Mohammed Mosaddegh, Stone says. And to make matters worse, it was carried out solely to guarantee Western access to Iran&#8217;s oil, Stone maintains.</p>
<p>In other words, all the troubles between Iran and the United States are the American government&#8217;s fault. The fact that Mosaddegh and his fellow looters stole from U.S. investors by nationalizing the assets of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Co. (later known as British Petroleum or BP) doesn&#8217;t figure in Stone&#8217;s calculus. He doesn&#8217;t care that the U.S. used its intelligence apparatus to restore property to its rightful owners, a proper function of government.</p>
<p>The Cold War itself, which began even before the dust of the Second World War had settled, was needlessly prolonged by Eisenhower, Stone argues.</p>
<p>Joseph Stalin died a little over a month after Eisenhower became president in January 1953. But according to Stone, Ike was incompetent because he failed to singlehandedly end the Cold War right there and then.</p>
<p>&#8220;Signs emanating from Moscow indicated the Kremlin was ready to change course, but because of ideology, political calculations, the exigencies of a militarized state and a limited imagination, Eisenhower repeatedly failed to seize the opportunities that emerged,&#8221; Stone says.</p>
<p>Stone has engaged in this kind of revisionist fantasy before. He previously attempted to turn President John F. Kennedy into a radical left-wing folk hero by inventing the idea that JFK was a dove who was secretly preparing to de-escalate U.S. hostilities in Vietnam when he was cut down by an assassin.</p>
<p>In any event, it&#8217;s unclear what Soviet smoke signals Stone is referring to and even less clear what Eisenhower could have done during the three years after Stalin&#8217;s death that it took the less bloodthirsty Nikita Khrushchev to consolidate power in the still-totalitarian USSR.</p>
<p>But this kind of bold unprovable assertion, the idea that Ike could have waved a magical wand to end the Cold War the moment Stalin died, is nothing new for Stone. The director pulls supposed facts out of thin air and trumpets them in order to generate publicity for his work.</p>
<p>Stone also takes on the U.S. rationale for fighting the Cold War. Defending America against Communism wasn&#8217;t a matter of national survival; it was strictly a means of fattening corporate coffers.</p>
<p>&#8220;Anticommunism was good for business,&#8221; the 66-year-old Oscar winner and media darling matter-of-factly intones.</p>
<p>Highlighting the same passages used to set the stage in the opening minutes of his paranoid conspiracy-theory film from 1991, <em>JFK</em>, Stone shows archival footage of Eisenhower in black and white, stiffly reading his 1961 farewell address aloud.</p>
<blockquote><p>We have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. The total influence &#8212; economic, political, even spiritual &#8212; is felt in every city, every statehouse, every office of the federal government. [...] In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. [...] We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes.</p></blockquote>
<p>In Stone&#8217;s view, the address showed that &#8220;Eisenhower seemed to understand the monstrosity he had created and seemed almost to be asking for absolution.&#8221;</p>
<p>But that forgiveness is not forthcoming.</p>
<p>Stone accuses Ike of creating the very same &#8220;military-industrial complex&#8221; that the 34th president denounced in his famous farewell address.</p>
<p>&#8220;The inescapable truth is that the beloved Dwight Eisenhower put the world on a glide path towards annihilation with the most gargantuan expansion of military power in history and left the world a far more dangerous place than when he first took office,&#8221; Stone lectures, without trotting out actual evidence of heightened peril.</p>
<p>The mere fact that Ike led a U.S. military buildup <em>is</em> proof that he was a monster, in Stone&#8217;s eyes. That the Soviet Union was also participating in the arms race seems to have escaped his notice.</p>
<p>Stone is especially incensed at the role Eisenhower played in the so-called Red Scare. The phony threat of Communism, as he sees it, was perpetuated by Eisenhower after first being manufactured by President Truman, Sen. Joe McCarthy, arms makers and others to justify anti-Soviet saber-rattling.</p>
<p>Stone believes that the real tragedy, apart from America&#8217;s pesky insistence on defending itself against Communist aggression, was that left-wing groups intent on subverting America from the inside suffered political setbacks as their treachery was exposed for all to see. In other words, it disturbs the Communist-loving movie director that in the Eisenhower era, supporting Marxism <em>temporarily</em> ceased to be cool in America after decades of being considered avant-garde.</p>
<p>&#8220;The Red Scare eviscerated the U.S. left, the labor unions and political and cultural organizations which had spurred the reforms of the New Deal, 1930s and 1940s,&#8221; Stone says.</p>
<p>&#8220;With the exception of the civil rights and antinuclear movements left-wing dissent and progressive reform throughout the 1950s would remain silent and the labor movement would never recover.&#8221;</p>
<p>The Red Scare hurt America more than it hurt the Soviet Union, Stone editorializes. &#8220;It certainly decimated the legal Communist Party USA whose membership had dropped from 80,000 in &#8217;44 to below 10,000 by the mid &#8217;50s, with probably 1,500 of them paid FBI informants.&#8221;</p>
<p>Stone ignores the fact that after a few years in a holding pattern after World War Two, the Left enjoyed a ferocious resurgence in the 1960s and 1970s. He also doesn&#8217;t mention that the labor movement&#8217;s decades-long slide into oblivion is largely related to its own self-inflicted wounds, overreaches, and insistence on killing the corporate golden goose.</p>
<p>Stone doesn&#8217;t dare point out that the Communist Party USA wasn&#8217;t a bunch of kind-hearted idealists trying to make America a better place. The CPUSA was controlled by the Soviet Union for most of its history. The Moscow-directed party also engaged in espionage, infiltrated labor unions, and used front groups to act as a fifth column within the United States.</p>
<p>It needs to be noted that even the term Stone uses, &#8220;Red Scare,&#8221; is a lie. It is a deceptively misdescriptive name for American culture&#8217;s entirely rational response to the threat posed by world communism, Soviet spies, and domestic subversives in the 1950s.</p>
<p>Stone thinks Ike should have taken on the anticommunists in an era in which &#8220;paranoia was rampant.&#8221;</p>
<p>Because Eisenhower &#8220;never publicly attacked the extremist tactics of the Red Scare and the Lavender Scare,&#8221; it is his fault that throughout &#8220;the 1950s political debate essentially continued to vanish in the United States,&#8221; the director claims.</p>
<p>Stone doesn&#8217;t seem to understand that political debate didn&#8217;t exactly &#8220;vanish&#8221; in the Fifties.</p>
<p>It simply didn&#8217;t favor the Left.</p>
<p>But this is one of the key reasons Stone doesn&#8217;t like Ike.</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/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>3. 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>4. 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>5. Bruce Thornton&#8217;s review of &#8220;<a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-thornton/oliver-stones-cold-war-melodrama/">The Cold War: 1945-1950</a>,&#8221; the 4th 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>
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		<title>Oliver Stone’s Cold War Melodrama</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-thornton/oliver-stones-cold-war-melodrama/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=oliver-stones-cold-war-melodrama</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 07 Jan 2013 04:30:50 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Thornton]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Cold War]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Communism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Oliver Stone]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[A Hate-America documentary series blames the U.S. for Soviet expansionism. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-thornton/oliver-stones-cold-war-melodrama/showposter/" rel="attachment wp-att-172365"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-172365" title="showposter" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/showposter.jpg" alt="" width="298" height="282" /></a><em>Editor’s note: The following is the fourth 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,” currently airing Mondays on Showtime. 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 4 of Stone’s series.</em></p>
<p>Oliver Stone is the mastodon of the La Brea tar pits of left-wing ideology. In his movies over the years he has recycled stale left-wing narratives with all the nuance and complexity of a Soviet-era <em>Pravda</em> editorial. Now he has brought his agitprop gifts to cable television in the Showtime series “The Untold History of the United States.” In episode 4, “The Cold War: 1945-50,” Stone once again tells the fossilized and duplicitous tale of America’s greed and aggression against a Soviet Union that just wanted to get along with its war-time ally.</p>
<p>Those of a certain age will recognize the story Stone tells, for it was dominant among left-wingers all the way up to the day the Soviet Union collapsed into the dustbin of history, and still can be found among diehard true believers. In this rewriting of history, the Soviet Union had been a stalwart ally during World War II, bearing the brunt of the fight against Nazism and suffering 27,000,000 dead. In 1945, the possibility of continuing cooperation between the West and the Soviets was destroyed by America’s aim to use its overwhelming economic and military power to dominate the world and to destroy the socialist and communist challenges to its hegemony. Winston Churchill is one of the villains in this story. Eager as he was to maintain the British Empire, Churchill’s famous “iron curtain” speech delivered in Fulton, Missouri represented to Stone a “quantum leap in bellicosity” against the Soviets.</p>
<p>President Harry Truman also took a hard-line against the Soviet Union and the democratically elected communist parties in France and Italy, and in 1948 helped England to crush a “popular leftist” government in Greece. This aggression, camouflaged as the  “Truman Doctrine,” against a wartime ally was rationalized by propagating what Stone calls the false “image of the Soviet Union out to conquer the world.” In fact, Stone explains, the Soviets––“stunned” by Truman’s bellicosity–– were simply trying to rebuild their war-shattered country and alleviate its “crushing poverty,” defend their western borders against their historical enemy Germany, and seek the “warm water ports” necessary for their geopolitical interests. Ignoring these understandable needs, Truman bullied the Soviet Union, using nuclear blackmail to drive them from Iran, forcing Germany to cut off reparation payments, and continuing to test nuclear weapons.</p>
<p>Fearful of Truman’s imperialist expansionism, the Soviets responded to intervention in Greece with a coup in Hungary, and imposed on its Eastern European satellites a “new and stricter order,” as Stone euphemizes the brutal totalitarian regimes imposed on Eastern Europe. The hero in Stone’s tale is communist fellow traveler Henry Wallace, who “tried to put a stop to the growing madness,” but was spied upon and denigrated by the Truman administration, ending any chance of stopping the “nuclear arms race.” Yet fearful of the “Republican right,” Truman at home instituted surveillance of suspected “subversives,” demanded loyalty oaths, and investigated suspected communists in Hollywood and unions, thus pandering to the irrational fear of communism widespread among Americans vulnerable to the machinations of capitalist overlords. What followed this “red scare” were anti-communist propaganda in movies, and the “witch hunts” conducted by the FBI and CIA, “capitalism’s invisible army,” as Stone calls it.</p>
<p>So goes Stone’s melodrama, in which peace-loving Soviets are driven to occupation and subversion by the imperialist hegemonic ambitions of a United States eager to become the world’s dominant power in order to maximize capitalist profits. Every Soviet move is explained as a natural response to American provocations and aggression. Thus the Soviets overturned the Czech government and installed a puppet regime in 1948, a “purely defensive move,” Stone explains, because the Czech acceptance of Marshall aid was understandably seen as a tool of American penetration. This is the same stale apologetics for tyranny that I remember parroting in my left-wing callow youth, and it will only impress those who are as ignorant of historical fact as I was then. And it works, as most bad history does, by omitting inconvenient truths.</p>
<p>Take, for example, Stone’s central justifying assumption: the implication that the West’s fear of Soviet plans for “world domination” was a paranoid fantasy manipulated by the U.S. government to further its own ambitions to control the world. To believe this requires not only ignoring or explaining away, as Stone does, the decades of mass murder and brutal tyranny perpetrated by Soviet leaders in thrall to an expansionist ideology, but also forgetting the words of Soviet leaders themselves.</p>
<p>In fact, as the great historian of Soviet tyranny <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Reflections-Ravaged-Century-Robert-Conquest/dp/0393320863/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1357497875&amp;sr=1-3&amp;keywords=robert+conquest">Robert Conquest</a> writes, “The Soviet assumption that all other political life-forms and beliefs were inherently and immutably hostile was the simple and central cause of [the] Cold War.” Thus there “was never any question of a permanent accommodation between the USSR and the ‘capitalist’ world.” Any “temporary relaxation, a reining back, of the ideology’s inherent expansionism” was strictly tactical, a delay made necessary by Soviet weakness, as in the period following World War II. As Stalin said in 1945, “We shall recover in fifteen or twenty years, and then we’ll have another go at it.” In that same year, Deputy Foreign Minister Maxim Litvinov, in response to ambassador Averell Harriman’s question what the West could do to satisfy Stalin, answered, “Nothing.” In 1946 Litvinov told a Western journalist that the “root cause” of the confrontation with the West was the view in Russia that such a conflict was “inevitable.”</p>
<p>The ultimate triumph of communism was the supreme goal of Soviet foreign policy, as codified by Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko. In 1968––the year the Soviets brutally crushed the liberal democratic uprising in Czechoslovakia known as the Prague Spring––Gromyko said that “the range of our country’s international interests is not determined by its geographical position alone,” and “despite an acute situation, however far away it appears from our country, the Soviet Union’s reaction is to be expected in all capitals of the world.” Later in his 1975 book <em>The Foreign Policy of the Soviet Union</em>, Gromyko wrote, “The Communist Party subordinates all its theoretical and practical activities in the sphere of foreign relations to the task of strengthening the positions of socialism, and the interests of further developing and deepening the world revolutionary process.” So too General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev, who said, “Our Party has always warned that in the ideological field there can be no peaceful coexistence” with capitalist countries. In 1972 he added regarding the policy of détente, “While pressing for the assertion of the principle of peaceful coexistence, we realize that successes in this important matter in no way signify the possibility of weakening our ideological struggle. On the contrary, we should be prepared for an intensification of this struggle and for its becoming an increasingly acute form of struggle between the two social systems.” This belief had been consistent with Soviet communism ever since Lenin proclaimed a necessary “series of frightful clashes” between communism and capitalism, and so cannot be explained away, as Stone attempts to do, as defensive reaction to American aggression.</p>
<p>It seems, then, that Stone’s paranoid anti-communists like Truman had a valid point, one confirmed by the extensive Soviet spying and subversion that in fact took place in America, as well as the violent subjection and oppression of other countries across the globe. It also explains the point made by historian Richard Pipes in 1975, and confirmed by documents from Soviet archives accessible after the regime’s collapse, that despite protests to the contrary, the Soviet regime was prepared to fight and win a nuclear war. As Soviet official V.V. Zagladin said in 1988, “Repudiating nuclear war and conducting an active struggle for peace, we nevertheless proceeded from the assumption of the possibility of victory in a possible conflict.” Conquest adds, “The Communist armies, as we now know, were on a very short notice for an invasion of West Germany, with the certainty of a tactical nuclear exchange. And military thinking in Moscow inclined to a view that nuclear war, while to be avoided, was winnable.” Given these beliefs, the U.S. aim to maintain superiority in armaments, derided at the time as a dangerous “arms race,” and to resist communist expansion across the globe were necessary for peace and American security.</p>
<p>This evidence of Soviet ideologically driven expansionism destroys the central assumption of Stone’s apologetic narrative: that the West overreacted irrationally against the understandable foreign policy interests of the Soviet Union, thus instigating reciprocal overreactions by the Soviets. Many other distortions of history, of course, riddle the film. The implication that the Soviet Union was a friendly ally during World War II is absurd. Stone neglects to mention that in August 1939 Stalin signed a treaty with Hitler and for nearly two years provided much needed resources to Germany until Hitler invaded Russia. Stalin became our ally on the principle that the enemy of my enemy is my friend, and cooperated with the West not on principle but in order to survive and to receive much-needed aid. The explanation of Ukrainian resistance to the Soviets in 1948 as fueled by American subversion and support of fascists ignores the 5 million Ukrainians slaughtered by Stalin before the war during the terror-famine campaign of 1932-33. In his encomium to Henry Wallace, Stone doesn’t tell us that Wallace’s Progressive Party was mostly a creation of a Communist Party that took its money and marching orders from Moscow, and that Wallace’s candidacy according to one writer was “the closest the Soviet Union ever came to actually choosing a president of the United States.”</p>
<p>Stone’s film is a tired reprise of decades of apologetic revisionist history on the part of leftist radicals who subordinate truth to ideology. Yet we should not dismiss it as unimportant or without consequence. As John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr––two historians whose <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Denial-Historians-Communism-Espionage/dp/159403088X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1357498182&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=in+denial+haynes">studies</a> of Soviet archives provide the evidence of communist subversion ignored by Stone and others––write, “Communism as a social fact is dead. But communism as a pleasant figment of the ‘progressive’ worldview lives on, giving a phantom life to the illusions and historical distortions that sustained that murderous and oppressive ideology. The intellectual Cold War, alas, is not over. Academic revisionists who color the history of American communism in benign hues see their teaching and writing as the preparation of a new crop of radicals for the task of overthrowing American capitalism and its democratic constitutional order in the name of social justice and peace. Continuing to fight the Cold War in history, they intend to reverse the victory of the West and convince the next generation that the wrong side won, and to prepare the way for a new struggle.” In the age of Obama, this warning is more important than ever.</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/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>3. Daniel Flynn&#8217;s review of &#8220;<a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/daniel-flynn/through-oliver-stones-looking-glass/">Roosevelt, Truman and Wallace</a>,&#8221; the second episode.</p>
<p>4. 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><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>
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		<title>Oliver Stone&#8217;s Untrue History: Stalin the Great Hero of WWII</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/matthew-vadum/oliver-stones-untrue-history-stalin-the-great-hero-of-wwii/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=oliver-stones-untrue-history-stalin-the-great-hero-of-wwii</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 20 Dec 2012 04:52:25 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Matthew Vadum]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[History]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[Castro's worshiper weaves a twisted tale of America's immoral and minor role in the Second World War.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/matthew-vadum/oliver-stones-untrue-history-stalin-the-great-hero-of-wwii/stalin-n-2/" rel="attachment wp-att-170251"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-170251" title="stalin.n" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/stalin.n1.jpg" alt="" width="222" height="166" /></a><em>Editor’s note: The following is the first installment of a series of articles Frontpage will be running in the days ahead in response to Oliver Stone’s neo-Communist documentary series, “The Untold History of the United States,” currently airing Mondays on Showtime. 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 I of Stone&#8217;s series. </em></p>
<p>America is a soulless, unexceptional country that has done more harm than good over the last 70 years, leftist Oliver Stone argues in &#8220;World War II,&#8221; the first installment of his latest documentary project.</p>
<p>In Stone&#8217;s multi-part revisionist assault on modern American history, <em>Untold History of the United States</em>, the Communist-loving movie director argues that the U.S. lost the Second World War to the Soviet Union, our allies at the time. The Soviet Communists may have been harsh and violent, but they saved the world, not America. America was too busy getting rich building weapons of mass destruction to make the world safe for capitalism, or something along those lines, according to Stone.</p>
<p>The 66-year old Oscar winner opens the first episode with a soliloquy summing up his journey from patriot to Howard Zinn wannabe.</p>
<p>When Stone was a young boy learning about U.S. history, America was &#8220;the center of the world,&#8221; he says in the narration.</p>
<blockquote><p>&#8220;There was a manifest destiny. We were the good guys. Well, I&#8217;ve traveled the world now. I continued my education as an infantryman in Vietnam. I&#8217;ve made a lot of movies, some of them about history, and I&#8217;ve learned a lot more than I once knew. And when I heard from my children what they were learning in school I was perturbed to hear that they were not really getting a more honest view of the world than I did.&#8221;</p></blockquote>
<p>As Americans, &#8220;we live much of our lives in a fog &#8211;all of us&#8211; but I would like my children to have access to something that looks beyond what I call the tyranny of now,&#8221; said Stone, pretending to have invented the concept of <em><a href="http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/presentism">presentism</a></em>.</p>
<p>All good propagandists know that the use of scapegoating and simplistic story lines make falsehoods easy for some people to digest, and Stone is one of the best.</p>
<p>Stone does his best to reduce America&#8217;s history to utopian socialist pabulum, calling the U.S. government&#8217;s development of the atomic bomb the catalyst that turned &#8220;the refuge of the Founding Fathers into a militarized state.&#8221; It seems reasonable to guess that Stone, like so many other radicals, would have considered America more virtuous if it had refrained from bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end the war and instead sacrificed a half million or more American lives (and at at least one million Japanese lives) in a full-scale invasion of Fascist Japan.</p>
<p>Robert Oppenheimer, the American scientist who led the Manhattan Project team that developed the bomb, escapes Stone&#8217;s wrath because among leftists good intentions trump worldly deeds even when those intentions lead to catastrophe.</p>
<p>Stone deems Oppenheimer a noble soul because he was a Communist sympathizer. Oppenheimer gave up to 10 percent of his salary to help the priest-murdering Spanish Republicans. Stone notes that even though President Franklin D. Roosevelt banned the shipment of arms to Spain in the years leading up to World War II, &#8220;2,800 brave Americans&#8221; fought, mostly for the Communists.</p>
<p>Despite his refusal to help Spanish radicals, Roosevelt wasn&#8217;t all bad, as Stone sees it. When he sought a third term in office in 1940, FDR had the good sense to put a so-called progressive, Communist sympathizer Henry A. Wallace, on the ticket as vice presidential nominee.</p>
<p>As Secretary of Agriculture during the Great Depression, Wallace habitually interfered with the economy, engaging in social engineering schemes that free market economists say helped to prolong and exacerbate the nation&#8217;s agony. But Stone hails Wallace as a visionary for giving subsidies to farmers to not grow crops, giving the urban poor food stamps and school lunches, and launching programs for land use planning and soil conservation.</p>
<p><em>Untold History</em> covers largely the same ground as <em>Cold War</em>, the epic 24-part series produced by CNN founder Ted Turner in association with BBC News in 1998. That grim extended documentary, narrated by Kenneth Branagh, was legitimately criticized for pushing a false moral equivalence between the United States and the Soviet Union.</p>
<p>At the time Jacob Heilbrunn blasted the series in the <em>New Republic</em> for depicting the decades of tension between the two countries as a &#8220;morally unintelligible contest between two equally dangerous superpowers, whose fear of each other constantly threatened to plunge a world full of innocent bystanders into nuclear holocaust.&#8221;</p>
<p>But even with its problems, <em>Cold War</em> is celluloid jingoism compared to Stone&#8217;s ahistorical <em>Untold History</em>.</p>
<p>&#8220;Obsessively, Stalin spoke of the danger to world peace, the need for vigilance against internal enemies,&#8221; said <em>Cold War</em> narrator Branagh.</p>
<blockquote><p>&#8220;Conformity was enforced by police terror and by a slavish cult of [Joseph] Stalin&#8217;s personality. He became godlike; his icon worshiped everywhere. For those who did not conform there was silence and death behind the barbed wire. The gulag, the secret empire of concentration camps, stretched over 4,000 miles from the Baltic to the Pacific. In the Cold War years the camps continued to devour the lives of millions.&#8221;</p></blockquote>
<p>The strongest condemnation Stone can offer of Stalin, one of the world&#8217;s most prolific mass murderers, is that he was &#8220;a brutal dictator.&#8221;</p>
<p>In fact Stone praises Stalin as a pragmatic hero, who, by fighting Adolph Hitler&#8217;s merciless war machine, saved not only his homeland but the whole world.</p>
<p>According to Stone, for years before the war began, Stalin had implored the countries of the West to take on Hitler. Stone seems to imply that America could not be counted on to defeat the Third Reich because its people didn&#8217;t care much for Jews. The U.S. and its allies did little to help German Jews from 1938 onward as Nazi persecution intensified, Stone says, granting admission to precious few Jewish refugees. Of course the Allies &#8211;including the USSR&#8211; destroyed the Nazi war machine, but Stone doesn&#8217;t point this out.</p>
<p>In early 1939, when Hitler took over what remained of Czechoslovakia, violating his pledge not to advance beyond the Sudetenland, Stalin became a hero in Stone&#8217;s eyes:</p>
<blockquote><p>&#8220;Stalin recognized the truth. His country was facing its most deadly enemy alone. He needed to buy time and fearing a German-Polish alliance to attack the USSR he shocked the West when he signed a nonaggression pact with Hitler dividing Eastern Europe between them. Stalin&#8217;s primary concern was the security of his own nation. In fact the Soviet dictator had proposed the same alliance with Britain and France but neither would accept Stalin&#8217;s demand to place Soviet troops on Polish soil as a way of blocking the Germans.&#8221;</p></blockquote>
<p>American politicians didn&#8217;t appreciate the sacrifice Stalin was making for world peace, Stone suggests. After Hitler double-crossed Stalin and initiated Operation Barbarossa, Germany&#8217;s ferocious invasion of the USSR, &#8220;there were still many in the West who, frankly, were glad to see the Soviet Union finally on her knees.&#8221;</p>
<p>Stone offers then-Sen. Harry Truman, as an example of such supposed shortsightedness. An actor&#8217;s voice repeats Truman&#8217;s words spoken on the floor of the Senate in 1941: &#8220;If we see that Germany is winning then we ought to help Russia, and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany and that way let them kill as many as possible.&#8221;</p>
<p>America and its allies were only minor players in the Second World War, Stone pontificates.</p>
<p>In the &#8220;pivotal years&#8221; of the conflict, &#8220;the Soviets were regularly battling more than 200 German divisions. In contrast the Americans and the British fighting in the Mediterranean rarely confronted more than 10 German divisions. Germany lost over 6 million men fighting the Soviets and approximately 1 million fighting on the Western front.&#8221;</p>
<p>We&#8217;ve all been brainwashed into believing that America and the allied powers triumphed in the war, Stone says, referring to &#8220;the myth [that] lives on that the United States won.&#8221;</p>
<p>&#8220;Serious historians agree that it was the Soviet Union, that its entire society,&#8221; including Stalin, &#8220;who through sheer desperation and incredibly stoic heroism forged the great narrative of World War II: the defeat of the monster German war machine.&#8221;</p>
<p>Like the schoolchild whose dog ate his homework, Stone fails to name those supposed giants of historiography who accuse the USSR&#8217;s allies of failing to pull their own weight and riding Stalin&#8217;s coat-tails to victory in 1945.</p>
<p>Because more Soviet soldiers died (around 8 million) than American soldiers (around 400,000) in the war, according to Stone the Soviets have a stronger moral claim to victory. He ignores the fact that many Red Army soldiers perished helping to extricate the USSR from Stalin&#8217;s cynical, short-lived nonaggression pact with Hitler.</p>
<p>Stone also appears to discount the American contribution to the liberation of Western Europe before, during, and after the D-Day invasion of 1944. Using his own bizarre calculus, Stone gives the &#8220;win&#8221; to the USSR simply because more of its often ill-equipped soldiers died.</p>
<p>Throughout his professional life the Hollywood leftist has always been a gifted fabulist.</p>
<p>The Fidel Castro-worshiping, anti-American icon-smasher, has crafted movies that seduce audiences, selling them on far-fetched conspiracy theories.</p>
<p>Stone pulled the wool over a generation of Americans, convincing them that Lee Harvey Oswald had little if anything to do with the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Gallup polls <span style="text-decoration: underline;"><a href="http://www.gallup.com/poll/1813/most-americans-believe-oswald-conspired-others-kill-jfk.aspx"><em>suggest</em></a></span> that Stone&#8217;s 1991 movie, <em>JFK</em>, a crazy quilt of revisionist conjecture, helped to bolster public belief in alternate theories of the assassination. Stone argues in the movie that the U.S. intelligence community worked with the mob and disgruntled Bay of Pigs survivors to murder the then-leader of the free world so American companies could reap colossal war profits &#8212; or something.</p>
<p>The wily Stone lied to us about Kennedy&#8217;s death, downplaying the obvious starring role played by Oswald, a dedicated Marxist-Leninist who previously defected to the USSR at the height of the Cold War.</p>
<p>Why stop lying now?</p>
<p><strong>Related articles on Stone&#8217;s series:</strong></p>
<p>1. 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 of the series.</p>
<p>2. <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/bruce-thornton/oliver-stones-left-wing-agitprop/">Bruce Thornton&#8217;s introduction</a> to this Frontpage series.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank">Click here</a>.  </strong></p>
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		<title>Oliver Stone&#8217;s Left-Wing Agitprop</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/bruce-thornton/oliver-stones-left-wing-agitprop/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=oliver-stones-left-wing-agitprop</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 17 Dec 2012 04:54:29 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Thornton]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Cold War]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Oliver Stone]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Peter Kuznick]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Untold History of the United States]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=169676</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Who controls the past controls the future.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/bruce-thornton/oliver-stones-left-wing-agitprop/1002822_1_0_bsc01_444x250-2/" rel="attachment wp-att-169691"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-169691" title="1002822_1_0_bsc01_444x250" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/1002822_1_0_bsc01_444x250.jpg" alt="" width="266" height="198" /></a><em>Editor&#8217;s note: The following is an introduction written to a series of articles Frontpage will be running in the days ahead in response to Oliver Stone&#8217;s neo-Communist documentary series, &#8220;The Untold History of the United States,&#8221; currently airing Mondays on Showtime. Frontpage will be reviewing each episode of the Stone series, exposing the leftist hateful lies about America and setting the record straight. To see Daniel Greenfield&#8217;s  review of &#8220;The Bomb,&#8221; the third episode of the series, click <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/dgreenfield/the-atom-bomb-and-the-truth-bomb/">here</a>. Stay tuned for more hard-hitting exposés of Stone&#8217;s distortions of U.S. history in the coming issues of Frontpage Magazine.<br />
</em></p>
<p>The American left has always lived by the slogan of “The Party” in Orwell’s <em>1984</em>: “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” The politicizing of history in the academy has led to an ideologically distorted interpretation of American history that has trickled down into the K-12 curriculum, shaping the perceptions of generations of Americans, and determining how U.S. history is presented in popular culture. Oliver Stone’s 10-part “documentary” on the Cold War airing on the Showtime cable channel, “The Untold History of the United States,” is merely the latest version of American history presented as left-wing propaganda.</p>
<p>Despite Stone’s claim that this leftist story of American history has been “untold,” or, as he told London’s <em>Guardian</em>, that the “dirty story” of America has been “sanitized,” it has long been a ubiquitous, tired cliché. Indeed, even before Howard Zinn’s 1980 masterpiece of agitprop, <em>A People’s History of the United States</em>––which has sold over 2 million copies and is a staple of university and high school reading lists––the melodrama of American historical crimes and oppression was a staple of progressive received wisdom. Indeed, so entrenched is this narrative in American culture that purveyors of it like Michael Moore, Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, and Oliver Stone––who is worth $50 million––have become rich peddling it. And contrary to Stone’s assertion that, though his version of the American story may have been “told” by “cutting edge” academic experts, it remains “unlearned” by students and the larger culture, some version of his view of history can be found in most American history textbooks from grade school to university. That’s why despising America for its historical crimes is an intellectual fashion marker, one of those things that everyone sophisticated and smart just knows, and that sets them apart from the mass of patriotic oafs who believe what Stone and his co-writer Peter Kuznick sneeringly deny––that America is “the world’s greatest nation.”</p>
<p>Why leftists like Stone hate America has long been obvious. The ability of free-market capitalism and liberal democracy to provide prosperity and personal freedom to an unprecedentedly large number of people has discredited the socialist and communist ideologies that have failed miserably and bloodily to achieve the extravagant utopian goals of the left. As Raymond Aron wrote in 1955, the left hates America because it “has succeeded by means which were not laid down in the revolutionary code. Prosperity, power, the tendency towards uniformity of economic conditions––these results have been achieved by private initiative, by competition rather than State intervention, in other words by capitalism, which every well-brought-up intellectual has been taught to despise.” Reinvigorating and promoting the socialist revolution thus requires slandering its most successful enemy. So too today, the rationale for those, like Barack Obama and Oliver Stone, who are eager to expand government power and control over society and the economy is found in what during his international “apology tour” Obama called America’s “arrogant, dismissive, derisive” behavior and the “darker periods in our history.” More political power is necessary for correcting and compensating for that oppressive record, and steering the locomotive of history back towards the internationalist leftist utopia.</p>
<p>But this leftist view of history results from facts and events evaluated in terms of some impossible utopian standard, instead of the record of how peoples and states have typically acted over time. As such it commits the mortal historiographical sin: presentism, the projection onto the past of contemporary standards, categories, and expectations. Thus the politically correct historian castigates the European and American violent collision with the Indians in the New World as a historically unprecedented crime, an act of  ”genocide” and a bloody stage of imperialist expansion. In historical reality, it was yet another instance of the major dynamic of world history: the migrations of people to obtain land, and the violent appropriation of it from those already there. Indeed, long before the coming of the white man, Indian tribes in America were violently seizing land from other tribes. For Indians, title was conferred by force, not by documents, as the Oglala Sioux chief Black Hawk said at a conference with the U.S. cavalry in 1851: “These lands once belonged to the Kiowa and the Crows, but we whipped those nations out of them, and in this we did what the white men do when they want the lands of the Indians.” Perhaps you can argue Americans should have known better, but then you’d have to admit they <em>are</em> better in some respect, something the America-hater vehemently denies.</p>
<p>Or we hear a lot about American slavery, as though it too was a historically unique phenomenon. But slavery has been universal among humans, with the exception of those peoples or tribes not strong enough to enslave others. What is remarkable is not the existence of slavery, but the rise of an anti-slavery movement that convinced people slavery was morally wrong, a movement powerful enough to spark in the United States a civil war in which 650,000 Americans died. It is the exceptions in American history that we need to study and acknowledge, not just the endless recitation of sins common among mankind. And even when judging those “crimes and misfortunes” of history, as Voltaire put it, we must locate them in the context of what humans over time have typically done. We must define our standard of judgment and be clear where that standard comes from. For genuine historians, the standard comes from the record of human behavior over time. For Stone and his ilk, the standard is a utopian one that no human society, comprising as it must flawed human beings, will ever live up to.</p>
<p>From that impossible perspective, then, history can be only a lurid melodrama of cardboard heroes and villains. For the left, this means defining “villain” in Marxist-Leninist terms. Hence leftists obsess over “imperialism,” a word that communist ideologues transformed into a crude smear. It has become one of what historian Robert Conquest calls  “mind-blockers and thought-extinguishers,” the function of which is “mainly to confuse, and of course to replace, the complex and needed process of understanding with the simple and unneeded process of inflammation.” “Imperialism” automatically denotes a self-evident evil, so all we have to do is attach the label to the United States in order to signify its oppression and exploitation.</p>
<p>But once again, the absence of intellectual precision and a reasonable standard of comparison leads to simplistic and misleading interpretations of historical events. Just say “imperialism” and you can reinterpret the Cold War against Soviet communist expansion as the pretext for America’s global power-grab. Of course, you have to ignore the fact that no careful historian would call America an “empire,” nor simplify its military action abroad into “imperialism.” And to call the Cold War camouflage for imperialist expansion is to ignore the massive amounts of evidence––much of it available even before the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 released definitive evidence from Soviet archives––that the communist superpower was actively subverting other countries through violence and espionage in order to expand its empire and to bring about the triumph of communism.</p>
<p>Equally important, any fair comparison of the United States’ behavior to that of other countries enjoying such overwhelming military and economic power will show that America has been remarkable not for its excesses, but for its restraint. What other country has spent billions rehabilitating a defeated foe, as the U.S. did after World War II, or providing humanitarian and foreign aid? Does Stone think the Romans would have honored the sort of rules of engagement or limitations on air power that the United States has demonstrated in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan? They would have made a desert and called it peace. Or has there been any other country that has welcomed in foreigners, and then allowed them to slander and vilify the very people who have given them freedom and opportunity? What other country allows its citizens not just to voice slanted and false criticisms of it, but to get rich doing it? This restraint and openness have sometimes been a consequence of tactical or pragmatic calculations, but they also reflect the foundational principles of the American political order and its commitment to freedom and individual rights.</p>
<p>The story that needs telling, then, is not the story of America’s sins, which have been the sins of an imperfect humanity found in every time and every place. We have heard that story over and over for the last half-century. The story we should be hearing is the story of America’s exceptional virtues, the dedication to personal freedom and rights that, no matter how often betrayed in the past, today remains a monument to those virtues. As the stale clichés of left-wing history saturating our culture and schools show, that’s the real “untold” and “unlearned” story of America.</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>
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		<title>The &#8216;Untold&#8217; False History That the Left Tells All the Time</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/dgreenfield/the-untold-history-of-the-left/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-untold-history-of-the-left</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 27 Nov 2012 04:55:32 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[America]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Robert Scheer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[untold history]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[Robert Scheer and Oliver Stone join forces in an orgy of anti-American hate.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/dgreenfield/the-untold-history-of-the-left/picture-9-24/" rel="attachment wp-att-166961"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-166961" title="Picture 9" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/Picture-9.png" alt="" width="233" height="175" /></a>Oliver Stone’s “The Untold History of the United States” is one of those untold histories that are told over and over again by the left. But no matter how often the left retells the same stories, it makes sure to add an “untold” in there, not because their revisionism of history was previously untold, but because the idea that a secret history is being uncovered carries with it a whiff of daring and rebellion that appeals to the students of a college campus looking for fresh answers and reversals of everything that they thought was true while growing up.</p>
<p>There are truly untold histories. The history of Communist terror in the Soviet Union and around the world is one of them. As is the history of John F. Kennedy’s assassination, not by some combination of the Mafia, CIA, Cuban exiles and space aliens, but by a fanatical leftist who had defected to the Soviet Union. And finally there is the untold history of American Communists who fought to overthrow the United States and replace it with a totalitarian state through a campaign of terror, treason and lies. A campaign that they waged with as much fanaticism as Lee Harvey Oswald waged his.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=938">Robert Scheer</a>, a co-founder of the domestic terrorist group, Red Family, is a one-man mausoleum of the shrill viciousness of the left and its radical program for America. Like Bill Ayers, Scheer has gone from anti-American terrorist to anti-American academic, teaching a course on media and society at the University of Southern California&#8217;s Annenberg School for Communication.</p>
<p>Scheer had acted as a consultant on Oliver Stone’s Nixon and has moderated discussions between Stone and Peter Kuznick, Stone’s collaborator on “The Untold History of the United States.” Scheer, like Stone and Kuznick, believes that Harry Truman was a war criminal, that the United States was the villain of the Cold War and that it is an empire in need of overthrowing. But propaganda isn’t much use unless it influences the next generation and so Scheer is bringing, “The Untold History of the United States” to the 152 USC undergraduates of his class.</p>
<p>The goal of the “The Untold History of the United States,” both book and propaganda series, is to become the new “A People’s History of the United States.” A multimedia project indoctrinating a new generation with the left’s funhouse mirror conspiracy theories of American history. There is a reason why old terrorists become academics. On the college campus there is no historical revisionism of the left so discredited that it cannot find credulous audiences among the young. And there is no one better than Oliver Stone for the job.</p>
<p>Stone’s specialty is turning left-wing propaganda into pop entertainment. From &#8220;Platoon&#8221; to &#8220;Born on the Fourth of July&#8221; to &#8220;JFK&#8221; to &#8220;Nixon&#8221; to &#8220;W,&#8221; Oliver Stone has played Andy Warhol to the red soup companies of men like Robert Scheer. And pop entertainment, whether it’s the Obama campaign or Oliver Stone’s Showtime series, is a vital weapon in winning the hearts and minds of a generation that is overeducated but lacks the ability to burst its own intellectual bubble.</p>
<p>Scheer’s own efforts at manufacturing pop propaganda faltered with “The Great American Stickup,” put out by Nation Books, which vanished quickly into the remainders bin without exercising any serious influence on the national dialogue. While leftists like Scheer dredge up the old Marxist cant about the people, they lack any ability to reach them. They need Stone, but at the same time Stone’s proximity discredits them.</p>
<p>Scheer, Stone and Kuznick share an obsession with a slice of history that began with the American alliance with the Soviet Union during World War II, hit a peak during Vietnam and slowly drained away during the Reagan era. Their ability to relate to events after the Cold War in any terms other than the old ideas of an American Empire run by industrialists maintaining a war industry for their own profit is completely lacking. The War on Terror appears to them only as an askew version of Vietnam. And Vietnam to them was only a consequence of the failure to properly appease Stalin and the Soviet Union.</p>
<p>Stalin and the atrocities of the Soviet Union are the sticking points of the American Reds still refighting the Cold War. They have been unable to come to terms with Stalin’s atrocities and the implications of those atrocities for the moral legitimacy of the Soviet Union and for its supporters. Rather than revise their understanding of history, they are still busy trying to revise history instead.</p>
<p>The Soviet Union was not a moral or ethical entity in the treatment of its workers, its people or its neighbors. Instead it was a monstrous political entity run by mass murderers. The only way for the Scheers and Stones to outrun this truth is by smearing the United States with even more blood and dirt. The more we learn about Soviet atrocities, the more “untold histories” of the United States emerge rehashing dated Communist propaganda into a narrative that exists only to distract Americans from the sins of some of the worst mass murderers of the 20<sup>th</sup> Century and their supporters on the left.</p>
<p>There are few academics sympathetic to Nazi Germany to be found on American campuses today, but there are quite a few who are sympathetic to the Soviet Union. While much of the left would prefer not to talk about Communism, there is an influential group that still thinks they can talk the victims out of the graves and transform the past by lying hard enough about it.</p>
<p>“The Untold History of the United States” is their concept. It will never truly become a pop success, unlike JFK, because the conspiracy theories that it is concerned with are only relevant to that old red left. Trying to justify the Soviet Union after its collapse is a dead end, but that doesn’t mean that they aren’t capable of still doing some damage.</p>
<p>Historical revisionism that whitewashes the crimes of the left will not change how most Americans, even how most college students, see the Soviet Union, but it suppresses the true untold history of the atrocities committed in the name of the revolution and the complicity of the left in those atrocities.</p>
<p>History is how we learn from the past and those who most need to learn from the past are those who are likeliest to repeat it. The modern college campus, like its predecessors, boils with frustrated idealism, agitation and utopianism. It is a place where dreams or nightmares can be born. And Scheer, like Stone, is determined that the next generation never learn what it needs to know to avoid repeating their own mistakes.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank">Click here</a>.  </strong></p>
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		<title>Oliver Stone’s Unbelievable Crap</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/david-horowitz/oliver-stones-unbelievable-crap/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=oliver-stones-unbelievable-crap</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 31 Oct 2012 04:54:57 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[David Horowitz]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Communism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Henry Wallace]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Saddam Hussein]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Stalin]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Untold History of the United States]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[A communist filmmaker brings his latest perverse attack on America to Showtime.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/david-horowitz/oliver-stones-unbelievable-crap/285757_10151109153466538_1447963112_n/" rel="attachment wp-att-163383"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-163383" title="285757_10151109153466538_1447963112_n" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/285757_10151109153466538_1447963112_n-350x350.gif" alt="" width="280" height="280" /></a></p>
<p style="text-align: left;"><strong>Originally published at <a href="http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Hollywood/2012/10/30/Oliver-Stone-David-Horowitz">Breitbart.com</a>.</strong></p>
<p>On the evidence of his new Showtime mini-series and companion book, Oliver Stone is both a communist and political moron, a redundancy to be sure. Having previously celebrated a trio of evil-doers – Castro, Arafat and Hugo Chavez – Stone now adds <em>The Untold History of the United States</em> to the cinematic garbage heap he has been piling up since <em>J.F.K.</em> and <em>Born on the 4</em><em><sup>th</sup></em><em> of July</em>. Like them, this latest contribution is an unrelenting (and unrelentingly perverse) attack on America as history’s Great Satan, the root cause of worldly evil.</p>
<p>The heroes of this latest Stone fantasy are &#8212; I kid you not &#8212; Vladimir Lenin and Henry Wallace. Wallace is cast by Stone as the visionary of a planet without capitalism and war, and consequently as America’s missed opportunity to change the world. Along the way, Stone composes nauseating apologetics for Joseph Stalin and other historical villains including even Saddam Hussein, all of which are necessary to sustain his preposterous narrative of America as the great villain of a century in which America in fact defeated the two most monstrous regimes on human record – the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany – liberating more than a billion people in the process.</p>
<p>For those too young to remember, Henry Wallace was a former Vice President who was snookered by American Communists into running for the White House in 1948 as the anti-Cold War candidate of the Progressive Party. The Progressive Party was a political front the Communists had created to help Stalin drag millions of East Europeans into his Soviet gulag and slaughterhouse. Two years later, when the Communists invaded South Korea, a chastened and pathetic Wallace went on television to concede that he had been duped into lending his name to a malevolent cause. Wallace died soon after in disgrace. Now Stone is attempting to resurrect his most shameful hour and present it to the uninformed as the second coming.</p>
<p>By contrast, <em>every</em> step of America’s way in Stone’s fabrication is portrayed in the worst imaginable light, up to and including the Islamist attacks of 9/11, which he describes as merely an excuse America used to conduct criminal wars “against two Islamic nations” that caused “far more damage to the United States than Osama bin Laden ever could,” while “shredding the U.S. Constitution and the Geneva Convention” in the process.</p>
<p>Even the title of Stone’s rant is a lie, since his narratives of the Bolshevik Revolution (idealists whose noble vision was thwarted by capitalist pigs), World War II (Stalin won it) and the Cold War (launched by American imperialists but ended by peace-loving Mikhail Gorbachev) are a twice-told story: the first time by Kremlin propagandists and their minions, the second by leftwing diehards who can’t handle the truth, and who have now been joined by the executives at Showtime in airing a miniseries that is malignant and unbelievable crap.</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>
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		<title>Oliver Stone&#8217;s Son: the Jewish Christian Muslim</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/bruce-bawer/oliver-stones-son-the-jewish-christian-muslim/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=oliver-stones-son-the-jewish-christian-muslim</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 22 Feb 2012 04:38:24 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Bawer]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[Kicking off Hollywood's latest conversion trend. ]]></description>
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<p>In the midst of all the important news stories competing for my attention lately, I found myself distracted the other day by what, at first blush at least, seemed a decidedly trivial one.  Apparently there exists someone by the name of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sean_Stone">Sean Stone</a>.  He is twenty-seven years old, and is the son of Oliver Stone, the famous film director, writer, and outspoken fan of Hugo Chavez, Fidel Castro, and other charismatic totalitarians.  Coincidentally, Sean Stone has also appeared in twelve of his father&#8217;s own movies, which means he is obviously an exceedingly talented young actor.</p>
<p>Sean was born with the middle name of Christopher, which means “bearer of Christ.” He has now, however, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sean_Stone">changed</a> his name to Sean Ali Stone, because he has converted to Islam.  In what seems a nod to family tradition, he did not just convert to Islam, he did it in a country run by the kind of tyrants his dad loves, namely <a href="http://www.nypost.com/p/pagesix/wood_snubs_muslim_stone_AxID3XZz34PKvRRtbWOQMK">Iran</a>.</p>
<p>Young Sean explains his new faith in good old-fashioned addled-celebrity style.  On the one hand: “I have said a simple prayer, ‘There is no God but God, and Mohammed is his messenger.’”  On the other:</p>
<p>“I am of a Jewish bloodline, a baptized Christian who accepts Christ’s teachings, the Jewish Old Testament and the Holy Koran. I believe there is one God, whether called Allah or Jehovah or whatever you wish to name him. He creates all peoples and religions. I consider myself a Jewish Christian Muslim.” It will be diverting to see how young Mr. Stone&#8217;s new Muslim friends will respond to his theological insights.</p>
<p>It is also worth noting that Sean&#8217;s conversion, according to him, followed hard upon his reading of the Koran.  He claims to have learned from his study of that volume that “Islam is not a religion of violence any more than Judaism or Christianity is.” He must somehow have missed the many passages in the book that vilify those who, like him, have a “Jewish bloodline.”</p>
<p>This news about Sean Stone caused my mind to wander back a few decades, to a time when the spiritual flirtations of addled showbiz types took rather different directions.  Some readers will be old enough, for example, to remember est (Erhard Seminars Training), which in its 1970s heyday snagged such big names as Cher, Cloris Leachman, Valerie Harper, and Yoko Ono.  Various varieties of Buddhism and Hinduism were also big for a while.  For a brief period, the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi famously won the devotion of the Beatles, helping to skyrocket the spiritual master into a higher tax bracket and purportedly inspiring the <em>White Album</em>.  Mia Farrow, who had just married Frank Sinatra, was also hanging around the Maharishi&#8217;s ashram at the time, along with Donovan and the Beach Boy&#8217;s Mike Love.  (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maharishi_Mahesh_Yogi">Reportedly</a> the Maharishi made a move on Mia, and you can hardly blame him: what red-blooded guru would pass up a chance to hit on Old Blue Eyes&#8217; wife?)</p>
<p>Then there&#8217;s Richard Gere and his decades-long <a href="http://www.lifepositive.com/spirit/world-religions/buddhism/gere.asp">involvement</a> with the Dalai Lama.  As it happens, <a href="http://www.adherents.com/people/ps/Oliver_Stone.html">Oliver Stone</a> also identifies as a Buddhist.  So does another famous Stone, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharon_Stone">Sharon</a>, who says she&#8217;s a Tibetan Buddhist (but is also, curiously, an ordained minister with the Universal Life Church).  Kabbalah studies have also been a big draw, winning such notable adherents as Roseanne Barr, Lindsay Lohan, Britney Spears, Paris Hilton, and, most famously, Madonna.  And need one even mention Scientology, which would almost appear to have been contrived, right down to the last detail, to appeal to a certain kind of Hollywood mindset?</p>
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		<title>Dancing With Devils</title>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 31 May 2010 04:04:01 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bill Muehlenberg]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[Why leftists bow to the torturers of mankind.]]></description>
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<p><strong>[This article is reprinted from the <a href="http://www.nationalobserver.net/default.htm">National Observer</a>.]</strong></p>
<p>One of the great unresolved questions of recent history is why so many members of the Western left have become so besotted with, and apologetic for, ruthless totalitarian regimes. There have always been Western leftists who have idolised brutal regimes — be it the Soviet Union, communist Cuba or Islamist Iran —and preferred them to their own countries in the free and prosperous West.</p>
<p>Others have documented this phenomenon, such as Paul Hollander in various classic works, including <em>Political Pilgrims: Travels of Western Intellectuals to the Soviet Union, China and Cuba, 1928-78</em> (1981) and <em>Anti-Americanism</em> (1995).</p>
<p>Here, in his recent book <a href="http://www.amazon.com/United-Hate-Romance-Tyranny-Terror/dp/1935071602/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1275279756&amp;sr=8-1-catcorr"><em>United in Hate</em></a>, Jamie Glazov makes an attempt at exploring and explaining the Left’s love affair with terror and tyranny.</p>
<p>Glazov is very well qualified to do so, and not only because he has a PhD in history, specialising in US and Russian foreign policy. His personal story contributes much to this book. His parents were Soviet dissidents who fought against communist tyranny and oppression.</p>
<p>They managed to escape to the US in 1972. Their initial taste of glorious freedom was soon soured when they learned that there were Western academics and intellectuals who actually hated them and the message they had to share. These Western apologists for Soviet murder and genocide wanted nothing to do with the Glazovs, and sought to denounce and demonise them in the strongest terms.</p>
<p>Back in the Soviet Union they had risked their lives to campaign for the millions who were being tortured and killed in the Gulag slave labour camps and psychiatric hospitals simply because of their political and religious beliefs. Yet in America they were being viciously attacked by an intelligentsia that loathed America while idolising communist barbarism.</p>
<p>It was a shock the young Glazov never really recovered from, and here he seeks to assess and understand this most bizarre feature of Western life. And with the onset of militant Islam, he sees the whole scenario again being played out before his eyes.</p>
<p>The first half of this important book covers the earlier cases of Western fascination with, and blindness to, totalitarian nightmare states. The Soviet Union, Castro’s Cuba and Mao’s China were all objects of wide-eyed leftist veneration and adoration.</p>
<p>Glazov reminds us of the words of the US ambassador to the Soviet Union, Joseph Davies, uttered during the height of Stalin’s murder of millions. He waxed eloquent in his love of Stalin with these words: Stalin’s &#8220;brown eye is exceedingly wise and gentle. A child would like to sit on his lap and a dog would sidle up to him.&#8221;</p>
<p>French writer Jean-Paul Sartre could say this about another murderous thug, Fidel Castro: &#8220;Castro is at the same time the island, the men, the cattle and the earth. He is the whole island.&#8221; And Father Daniel Berrigan, another longstanding apologist for tyrants, could say this of Hanoi’s prime minister Pham Van Dong: he is an individual &#8220;in whom complexity dwells: … a face of great intelligence, and yet also of great reserves of compassion …&#8221;</p>
<p>Or consider the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, who after capturing power in 1979 managed to carry out 8,000 political executions in the following three years. They made the nation a place of torture, repression and dictatorship. Yet plenty of Western leftists fell at their feet in worship.</p>
<p>German writer Günter Grass, who was shown a &#8220;prison&#8221; which the Sandinistas wanted political pilgrims to see — not the actual prisons where inmates were beaten, starved, tortured and killed — came back with euphoric exhilaration: &#8220;The humane way in which sentences are carried out!&#8221;, he gushed, along with other sentimental mush.</p>
<p>Of course, the Soviets had done just the same with the Gulag decades earlier, to fool gullible Westerners who came over for a look. Western left-wingers were just as ignorant and easily deceived in the 1930s or ’50s as they were in the ’80s.</p>
<p>And they still are. The second half of this book looks at Islamic terrorism, and its Western apologists. There are plenty of leftists in the West who are convinced that Islamic terrorism either does not exist, or is all America’s fault.</p>
<p>Again, Glazov offers plenty of examples. The September 11 atrocity provides plenty of quotes. Norman Mailer called the suicide-hijackers &#8220;brilliant.&#8221; He excused the attack by saying, &#8220;Everything wrong with America led to the point where the country built that tower of Babel which consequently had to be destroyed.&#8221;</p>
<p>Susan Sontag assured us that the terrorist attack was the result of &#8220;specific American alliances and actions.&#8221; Film-maker Oliver Stone affirmed that 9/11 was a &#8220;revolt&#8221; and said the ensuing Palestinian celebrations were comparable to those seen in the French and Russian revolutions.</p>
<p>Christian leader Tony Campolo could argue that 9/11 was a legitimate response to the medieval Crusades. German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen described the 9/11 attacks as &#8220;the greatest work of art for the whole cosmos.&#8221; On and on the apologists for terror and tyranny go. And then there is the inherent anti-Semitism in so much of this as well.</p>
<p>For many left-wingers, Israel is always the enemy, and the Muslim and Arab populations can do no wrong. Consider the remarks of Mike Wallace concerning Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has called for the annihilation of Israel: &#8220;He’s an impressive fellow this guy. He really is. He’s obviously smart as hell. … You’ll find him an interesting man.&#8221;</p>
<p>These leftists offered more support for Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein than they did for George W. Bush. Film-maker Michael Moore denounced the US while extolling the terrorists: &#8220;The Iraqis who have risen up against the occupation are not ‘insurgents’ or ‘terrorists’ or ‘The Enemy.’ They are the REVOLUTION, the Minutemen, and their numbers will grow — and they will win.&#8221;</p>
<p>Glazov devotes a chapter to seeking to examine the psychological makeup of these leftists whose romance with tyranny and terror seems so hard to fathom. They are alienated from their own homelands, although seldom realise it. They espouse a secular religion, a secular utopian vision which speaks much of humanity but is happy to see individual humans crushed in the attempt to create their coercive utopia.</p>
<p>The West-hating Left seems to be a permanent feature of modern Western life. Now that the communist revolution has lost its momentum, other causes must be found. The Islamist cause nicely does the trick. The same enemies are there, such as America, freedom and affluence.</p>
<p>As this book reminds us, we really have two enemies to contend with: murderous totalitarian ideologies of every stripe, and their Western leftist support base. It is an insidious alliance of which we all must be aware. This book does a fine job of making that very clear indeed.</p>
<p><em>Bill Muehlenberg is a commentator on contemporary issues, and lectures on ethics and philosophy. His website, CultureWatch is at: <a href="http://www.billmuehlenberg.com/" target="_new">www.billmuehlenberg.com</a>.</em></p>
<p><strong>To order a copy of <em>United in Hate</em>, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/United-Hate-Romance-Tyranny-Terror/dp/1935071602/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1275279756&amp;sr=8-1-catcorr">click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>Oliver Stone and the Left Cannot See a Cup Half Full</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/david-horowitz/oliver-stone-and-the-left-cannot-see-a-cup-half-full-2/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=oliver-stone-and-the-left-cannot-see-a-cup-half-full-2</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 11 Mar 2010 05:13:36 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[David Horowitz]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[One simple error in perspective has been the cause of incalculable human suffering from the beginning of time.]]></description>
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<p><strong>[Editor’s Note: David Horowitz had a debate with Oliver Stone several years ago in <em>National Scholastic Magazine</em>. Here’s his piece of the debate.] </strong></p>
<p>One of the principal sources of human misery is a tendency that exists in all of us to take for granted what we are given, and fail to appreciate what we have. There is even a folk wisdom that makes us aware of this, telling us to be wary of those who see the half empty glass when it is also half full. From the most intimate relations that take place within families to the political battles that determine the fate of nations, this simple error in perspective has been the cause of incalculable human suffering from the beginning of time.</p>
<p>In our century alone, visionaries of the left, rejecting the social order they inherited, <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=2042" target="_blank">murdered a hundred million human beings</a> in pursuit of their impossible dreams. In the name of <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/guideDesc.asp?catid=160&amp;type=issue" target="_blank">“social justice”</a> and to <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/Articles/THE%20RELIGIOUS%20ROOTS%20of%20Radicalism.htm" target="_blank">“make a better world,”</a> social utopians destroyed the political and economic structures of whole societies that had evolved organically in the course of centuries. What their revolutions produced was not – as they promised — something better than had been, but infinitely worse: a suffering greater than the world had ever seen.</p>
<p>When the revolutionaries seized power in 1917, Russia possessed a democratic parliament and an agricultural economy that produced a surplus for export to countries abroad. But Lenin’s social dreamers viewed Russia as a half-empty cup compared to what they imagined their socialist plans would create. As a result, they didn’t think twice about eviscerating Russia’s economy and decapitating its democracy. They were so confident that on the ruins a future would rise that was better than both. Freed of the restraints of custom and law, the liberators went on to slaughter 40 million “enemies of the people,” who were mostly peasants, and to put tens of millions of those who dissented in concentration camps for the greater good. All this was necessary, they said, to build a “people’s democracy” and a “worker’s state.” But they were able to build no <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/guideDesc.asp?catid=115&amp;type=issue" target="_blank">socialist paradise</a>. Instead they produced a world of famine, poverty and human suffering.</p>
<p>The most harrowing deficit of the new millennium may well be the fact that the lessons of these “experiments” have not been learned by many of the most creative minds in societies that have triumphed and survived. Few people describe themselves as “Communists” any longer, but the intellectual traditions and assumptions of the Left live on among <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/guideDesc.asp?catid=93&amp;type=issue" target="_blank">“progressives”</a> and “populists” and even “socialists” in the West. In a message to high school students at the beginning of the new era, for example, the film director <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=628" target="_blank">Oliver Stone</a> reprised these destructive passions of the past, disparaging the freedom America had given him and millions of others in favor of a familiar utopian aspiration.<a name="_ftnref1"></a><a href="http://www.newsrealblog.com/2010/03/10/oliver-stone-and-the-left-cannot-see-a-cup-half-full/#_ftn1">[1]</a></p>
<blockquote><p>“Essentially our freedom, our democracy, is a consumer freedom,” Stone admonished them. “What refrigerator do you want, what television do you want, what car do you want, is it Fab or Ajax?”</p></blockquote>
<p>His contempt for this freedom was the typical reflex of those who regard the enormous privileges bestowed by democracy and the market as a corrupting manna fallen from heaven.</p>
<p>The reality is different. From the beginning of recorded history, almost all inhabitants of all societies with the exception of a few very privileged among them, were forced to spend their entire waking hours working at hard physical labor just to keep from starving or to be warm enough to stay alive. For millennia the pursuit of the arts, literature and the sciences, the ability to spend a great portion of one’s life pursuing what one pleased – civilization itself — were treasures available only to aristocratic elites. The <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/guideDesc.asp?catid=128&amp;type=issue" target="_blank">capitalist revolution</a> ushered in economic possibilities and democratic freedoms that changed all that. Today, as a result, even the poor among us have amenities – running water, flush toilets, refrigeration, modern medicine, central heating, motorized transport, telephones, radio, television – that were unavailable to the richest people alive just 100 years ago. Today, the power available to virtually every American citizen in the form of an ordinary personal computer is greater than the power wielded by a factory owner in the 19<sup>th</sup> Century. Thanks to the power of the market, one can produce on an ordinary PC – available to virtually every man, woman and child — a newspaper or film, reach millions of individuals across the globe and access uncensored information that was unavailable even to kings in previous ages.</p>
<p>To the social utopians this is nothing. It is less than nothing. And therefore it is more. It is an inspiration for moral outrage. To utopians, the cornucopia of “consumer” wealth is a threat to the soul. It means that democracy itself is a sham. Dismissing nearly a millennium of struggle (since the signing of the Magna Carta) waged in behalf of popular sovereignty, Oliver Stone admonishes his high school audience thus:</p>
<blockquote><p>“Instead of wasting a lot of time reading about Tweedledum and Tweedledee for President, ask yourself…: Who owns America?…Who owns the media? Where does the money go?”</p></blockquote>
<p>To Stone “these are the key questions” that confront us on the threshold of the millennium:</p>
<blockquote><p>“This is what is controlling your 21<sup>st</sup> Century future.”</p></blockquote>
<p>Nonsense. The answer to these questions is readily available, and the opposite of what Stone means to insinuate. You own America. We do. Literally. Today, half the population owns shares in American companies and within decades virtually every American citizen will be also be an owner of capital. Stone himself is a self-made multi-millionaire. He is paid handsomely by the very capitalists he abuses and slanders, the very corporate oligarchs he pretends to fear. But Stone will not accept the freedom and privilege and power that America gives him. It is not enough. He wants more, even if our bitter historical experience tells him that wanting too much more may result in less, far less.</p>
<p>In any case, if others among us have more, what of it? Does it matter that Bill Gates has $100 billion and the rest of us don’t? Gates’ billions are invested in companies that create jobs and provide services and put power in the hands of millions of customers all over the world. Does this make him a tyrant? Is Gates free to lord it over the rest of us as Stone’s fantasy suggests? Not in this lifetime. The rule of the market is as strict as it is liberating. For if the corporations in which Bill Gates invests do not serve and satisfy their customers, others will, and will drive their competitors out of business. Even with $100 billion Bill Gates is no Sun King but must serve the people. And not only in business. He must obey the government they elect and over whom they are sovereign — the government that can punish his company if he abuses his power – and already has.</p>
<p>Like hormonal adolescents, <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=1232" target="_blank">the social critics of the left roil with inarticulate resentment and rage</a>. They are mad because the world does not bend to their desires. They are mad because aren’t smart or lucky enough to make $100 billion. And they want others to be mad too. They want to make the creative and successful avatars of business pay for the individual frustrations they feel. They blame “corporate capitalists” — the very creators of this incredible universe of products, services, and human opportunities – for everything they imagine they do not have. And they don’t want anybody to disagree with their righteous indignation. They will ferociously attack those who oppose them. Anyone who defends capitalism and its remarkable bounties available to all is a defender of inequality and “social injustice.” They attack those succeed in a free society, and infuse their attacks with historical romance:</p>
<blockquote><p>So you have a choice … –  it’s a tough choice because those of you who are students may not know the world very well yet, but the more you know it the more you find yoursaelf hostage to these forces, corporate and state forces that seek to control your mind and your inalienable right to the pursuit of your own conscience. You have that decision to make in your lifetime,…that decision is whether you’re going to live like a slave or whether you’re going to live like Spartacus, the famous Roman gladiator slave who led a revolt against his masters – and fight for your freedom and deny the bastards their victory over your soul.</p></blockquote>
<p>This is the “progressive” message to high school students, in America, on the threshold of the millennium! You are slaves! You must condemn the system that gives you “consumer freedom” and rise up against it!</p>
<p>The appeal of the self-appointed social redeemers among us is an appeal to human weakness, to the inarticulate resentments, the irresponsible angers and the feelings of powerlessness that are lodged in each of us. Guide yourself by “what [you are] really feeling as opposed to what [you] think [you] should be feeling…” is Stone’s wisdom for his high school audience.</p>
<p>My advice is the opposite: Feelings, whether authentic or false, are often the worst guide to what is real. The <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/guideDesc.asp?catid=145&amp;type=issue" target="_blank">feeling that one is persecuted by Jews</a> or threatened by blacks is what drives the haters among us. The feeling that capitalists and corporate rulers exploit and control the people, and stifle their freedom, is the force that inspired idealistic Communists to kill millions and leave wastelands behind.</p>
<p>Instead of feelings, let knowledge be your guide, particularly awareness of what has gone before. History is the record of our human experience and, more importantly, our human limits. This experience teaches a powerful lesson: Better to work with the world we have and improve it step by measured step, than to seek a revolution to wipe out the past and everything we have so painfully learned.</p>
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