http://frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-thornton/oliver-stones-cold-war-melodrama/print/
Editor’s note: The following is the fourth installment of a series of articles Frontpage is running in response to Oliver Stone’s revisionist 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.
Related articles on Stone’s series:
1. Bruce Thornton’s introduction to this Frontpage series.
2. Matthew Vadum’s review of Stone’s first episode.
3. Daniel Flynn’s review of “Roosevelt, Truman and Wallace,” the second episode.
4. Daniel Greenfield’s review of “The Bomb,” the third episode.
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 Pravda 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
