If you wish to go on loving America™

[tyrannosaurus vex]

Then DO NOT watch Oliver Stone's Untold History of the United States.

I consider myself reasonably "aware," at least more so than your average [American] monkey. But it turns out that I still hold a number of flat-out bullshit ideas about what America has done in the world since the outbreak of WW2, and what has driven America to its (now faltering) status as the sole "Superpower."

I was unsurprised but frustrated to learn that much of what I was taught in grade school about recent American History is, in fact, completely false. I had gathered through context clues while speaking with non-Americans online that America is not perceived as the "shining city on the hill" that we are told we are, and that we have in fact been behind a number of decidedly awful events on the world stage. But what I did not know was how intentional and callous our government's international (and domestic) behavior has been. It was my naive assumption that "difficult choices had to be made" and that throughout the Cold War we were fighting at least for something we believed in, even if we were misguided and short-sighted in the ways we chose to fight. But it turns out that no, almost nothing we have undertaken really has idealism or charity at its heart. America is, as much as any other empire in the history of the planet, completely and solely preoccupied with gaining and keeping power.

To be fair, the documentary does not really give "untold" history, as all of these facts are verified and easy to find if you are so inclined. And it does tend to lean heavily to the "Left," omitting huge amounts of negative information about the "other side," minimizing Soviet atrocities, and focusing heavily on the blunders and outrageous actions on America's part -- though I'm not sure how much of this is really "leaning Left" and how much of it is just "contradicts the American mythos." But the series does shed light on the backroom deals that shaped the world during and after the Second World War, and spends a lot of time grieving over the loss to our collective consciousness of would-be heroes like Henry Wallace. It effectively narrates America's path from relative international seclusion to almost absolute world domination through the actual decisions made by the actual people involved.

If you want an easy crash-course in What's Really Going On in the world, then watch it. But you'll lose every scrap of patriotism you have left in the process.

[Cain]

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[LMNO]

I'm finding it kind of hard to take anything Oliver Stone does seriously.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

I'm finding it kind of hard to take anything Oliver Stone does seriously.

This.  His fact-checking is a little sketchy at times.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

And I learned everything I needed to know to loathe this place, just by hitting wikipedia, and googling "The American-Phillipino War", and reading Smedley Butler.

[Cain]

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[tyrannosaurus vex]

What did you personally find most shocking?

I don't know if anything was really "shocking," since I'm as jaded and cynical as a straight white male can possibly be in this country, so there wasn't anything that caught me off guard. I knew The Bomb wasn't necessary to win the war. I didn't know that it was mostly the Russians who beat the Nazis -- not us. I was always taught that the Germans were mostly killed by the Russian winter (which I know sounds ridiculous but I never had a specific reason to question that narrative).

If anything, I was shocked to learn just how our Presidents are manipulated and fooled into doing the bidding of party bosses and industry leaders. They really do have their hands tied, most of the time, which means the only time a President really gets to carve out a big place for himself in history is when he takes what he's told to do way past any of his handlers' wildest dreams. To know that Henry Wallace -- a man who could and probably would have averted the entire Cold War and possibly the use of the Atomic Bomb against Japan -- would have succeeded FDR if it hadn't been for the corruption and greed of Democratic Party bosses during the 1944 Democratic Party Convention was all new to me.

I'm finding it kind of hard to take anything Oliver Stone does seriously.

This.  His fact-checking is a little sketchy at times.

This is true.  However, it was my understanding that, for this series, Showtime used their own factcheckers and hired Peter Kuznick (Professor of History at American University) to run things by before committing to airing them.

Oliver Stone's singleminded, borderline Communist interpretation of the facts is hardly hidden in the series, but at least for me it still leaves room to weight the events as they happened. It probably disqualifies the series as a true "documentary," but anything less would fall short of the goal of exposing the mythology of American Exceptionalism as a grotesque masquerade.

[Cain]

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[The Good Reverend Roger]

Worth a read:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_A._Wallace

In 1934, Roosevelt and the U.S. Department of Agriculture sent Roerich and his Harvard-educated son George, who had studied Asian languages, on an expedition to Central Asia to search for drought-resistant grasses to prevent another Dust Bowl. However, once there, Roerich upset the diplomatic world and the US agricultural experts who accompanied him by searching for and possibly trying to bring about a revival of the legendary Buddhist kingdom of Shambhalla, variously located in Tibet, Bhutan, Nepal, or Manchuria.[20] These areas were under the jurisdiction of the British and Japanese empires, which did not look kindly on movements for national self-determination. After Wallace recalled him, the U.S. government aggressively pursued Roerich for tax evasion, and the artist (the holder of a French passport) took up residence in India, where gurus were not considered so unusual.

During the 1940 presidential election, the Republicans gained possession of a series of letters that Wallace had written to Roerich in the 1930s. In them, Wallace had addressed Roerich as "Dear Guru", signing himself as "G" – for Galahad, the name Roerich had bestowed on him.[21] Wallace assured Roerich that he awaited "the breaking of the New Day" when the people of "Northern Shambhalla", a Buddhist term for the "land of pure enlightenment", would create an era of peace and plenty

So, yeah.

He had some good things to say on race, etc, but the rest of his party hated him, and he would have gotten precisely jack and shit accomplished.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

Yeah, Stone is a little too sympathetic to the Soviet Union for his own good.

Lots of people underestimate the Soviet contribution to the war effort.  My understanding is roughly 75% of all intentional casualties suffered by the German military and their allies were inflicted by Soviet troops, which is a huge number no matter which way you slice it.  I suspect Stone did not mention that the Soviet economy was being propped up by the Americans at that point, which was likely a significant contributing factor.  Moving the industrial base of the USSR behind the Urals and being able to move supplies and equipment from there was a likely improved as a consequence of this aid. 

I wonder if the myth of the Russian winter being responsible was due to the conditions in the PoW camps for German troops?  Quite often, the Soviets intentionally did not provide them with food or blankets, so they starved or froze to death.

Basically, the Russians won the war with help from the UK and the USA.

And the USSR wasn't something you'd want to be friends with, no matter how fucked up things were at home.

[Anna Mae Bollocks]

I'm finding it kind of hard to take anything Oliver Stone does seriously.

This.  His fact-checking is a little sketchy at times.

Didn't he get a lot of that Doors movie from the Sugarman book? 

Anyway, it's America^(TM). You know, that land mass that was acquired through genocide and worked by slavery. Whatcha expect?

[tyrannosaurus vex]

I'm not saying Stone offers the one true version of history here, only that he exposes a lot of what was really happening, politically, behind many of the events in the last 70 or so years. His is a decidedly red-tinted interpretation of these events, but it succeeds in illustrating many of the facts that are generally glossed over or totally omitted from the generally accepted narrative (in America). Oliver Stone may dash toward the Soviet version of history, but everyday American understanding of the same history dashes at least that far toward the other end of the argument.

The most interesting thing about this series isn't Oliver Stone's personal opinions about what happened or why, but the inclusion of otherwise wholly unconsidered variables in the overall story. I don't take what he says as gospel, especially when he basically denies the entire notion that the USSR was at all interested in toppling governments across the globe to export Communism. But I do appreciate hearing the other side of the argument and seeing the USA's equally crazed efforts to do exactly the same kind of nation building to set up governments friendly to its own interest, especially as described in the wider context of international relations. That America is still today as heavily committed to this policy as it accused the Soviets of being in the 1950s and 60s is something that's all too easy to ignore.

It's also interesting watching the clips of historical newsreels and political speeches, because while the message has evolved into something slightly more nuanced and sophisticated, we are still bombarded with almost exactly the same language today as justification for exactly the same kind of behavior.

[Pere Ubu]

If Stone's your problem, you could always just read Howard Zinn's People's History of the United States and James W. Loewen's Lies My Teacher Told Me.

William Blum's Killing Hope will also raise a few unsettling points about our foreign policy.

[tyrannosaurus vex]

If Stone's your problem, you could always just read Howard Zinn's People's History of the United States and James W. Loewen's Lies My Teacher Told Me.

William Blum's Killing Hope will also raise a few unsettling points about our foreign policy.

They're probably all Reds, too.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

You guys are too fucking negative.  Look at my avatar...That's Goddamn TEDDY ROOSEVELT machine-gunning a SASQUATCH.

Is this a great country or what?