General Discussion
Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsLast week I posted a poll regarding Oliver Stone
The general consensus was negative. In spite of that I am recommending a series on Netflix by Oliver Stone. It is titled "Untold history of the United States". Starts prior to WW2. I haven't finished the series yet so don't know how far it goes but it does mention Obama. Just finished Reagan era. Some of Stones editorial bias is obvious but I recognize it and ignore. It leans progressive so if you are progressive you will probably like it. Just try it for a bit and let me know what y'all think.
If you do not like him or the subject please do not condemn me for sharing this data, just trying to put out another perspective here.
PoindexterOglethorpe
(25,927 posts)JFK movie, so I'm very disinclined to see anything by him.
DonaldsRump
(7,715 posts)Stone's JFK is as outlandish as the Warren Commission's findings that Oswald acted alone.
I have no idea what the truth really is. That's why one of the worst days in the history of this country (November 22, 1963) is so shocking: how can we still doubt the true story about something as important as the JFK Assassination so many decades after it happened? This, plus Viet Nam, plus Watergate helped folks realize that the US government, like all governments, doesn't tell the truth.
To me, that's what Stone was really trying to say: the Warren Commission gave one fantastic rendering of truth, and Stone/Jim Garrison gave another. Which is worse?
shockey80
(4,379 posts)HotTeaBag
(1,206 posts)Thank you.
hunter
(38,349 posts)ProfessorGAC
(65,381 posts)After reading the critiques, I'm pretty sure I don't need to watch it.
We've probably already read or heard this all before.
For me, the near clincher is that it's "untold" but it's not really untold.
Drunken Irishman
(34,857 posts)And historically not quite accurate.
The problem with Stone's bias here is that impacts the truth significantly. He glossed over FDR's pitfalls, yet hammered Truman with his own. It was uneven in that regard. Truman had faults, but his faults were no more graver than FDR's. Moreover, I found it very interesting he essentially dismissed FDR's involvement in creating the atomic bomb and yet leveled some pretty tough charges on Truman for using it.
It's clear, from Stone's perspective, that Truman was a man ill-equipped to follow FDR's legacy and that Henry A Wallace was the rightful man to take his place. So much nuance was made to leave FDR blameless in this - and even today, many leftists blame this moment for the Democratic Party's shift to the right. Okay. Maybe true in the sense Truman was a moderate who absolutely stood more in opposition to the Soviets than Wallace ever would. But at the end of the day, FDR was president, and the most powerful Democrat in the country. He was the one who didn't put up a fight to keep Wallace on the ticket. All FDR would have had to do was give the party an ultimatum: Wallace remains as my Veep or I retire.
The party knew only one candidate was capable of winning that election and it was FDR. They would have buckled to his demands to keep the White House and then prayed like hell FDR didn't die.
But FDR only gave marginal push back to the demands.
The way Stone represents things is that the neoliberals of the party essentially did a modern day coup on Roosevelt.
But FDR also had a hand in it. Not just at the convention, but his previous handling of Wallace in the past. Wallace had been FDR's economic coordinator, but was removed from the spot by FDR because of how poorly he was doing the job.
The idealization of Wallace by Stone is also problematic because it doesn't jibe with the facts. Wallace was politically far-left, for sure, but he was also a very eccentric man, whose views were quite eccentric for the times. He was big into astrology, and there was some concern he had been compromised by the Soviets due to his overall naivety on US-Soviet issues.
Except Stone doesn't even go into any of that. Instead, he paints a picture of a man who was wronged and the Democratic Party purposely did him in so they could nominate the neoliberal Truman to get more war and weaken the New Deal.
Had Wallace become president, Stone's assertion is possibly true: he might not have dropped the atomic bomb on Japan. But I think that is where he and FDR differed. FDR was tactical, smart and tough. He made the very difficult decisions one would need to make to win a war. That is something Truman brought with him, as well. Wallace? I don't think he had the mental fortitude to make those decisions.
And it's also possible that Wallace's apathy toward the Soviets, and their significant hope of dominating much of Europe, would have led to an even worse end result as the end game very well could have resulted in a hot war with the Soviets had there been appeasement from the US' end.
Of course, Wallace likely also would have lost reelection in 1948. The hope, in this reality, is that Wallace's opponent would have been Dewey, who was a far more moderate Republican, and not, say, General MacArthur.
Either way, the problem with being subjective like Stone, when doing history, is that your own beliefs come out. You can't look at things rationally. It's why I would be no good at making a historical documentary because I have too many views myself.
But I can't get over Stone's treatment of Truman. Truman was a good president. In many ways, he was likely more influential on racial issues than even FDR, despite being president for a much shorter period of time.
Drunken Irishman
(34,857 posts)He states Wallace likely would not have dropped the atomic bomb and he may be correct. But we also don't know the level of intelligence Truman received that ultimately led to that decision. It's entirely possible, as well, that, given the same level of intelligence, Wallace makes the same decision.
Moreover, Wallace took a wild approach on nuclear weapons by stating that he intended to make atomic technology fully open to the public after the war on the basis that since nations could conceivably build them, why hide them?
Imagine that mentality. The dude had some far out ideas to be sure. But Stone doesn't really address these.
hunter
(38,349 posts)The major hurdles to be overcome in nuclear weapons production are economic and organizational.
There's also the problem that members of the existing "nuclear club" might break you and your stuff.
Enriching uranium or producing plutonium is expensive. Finding scientists, engineers, and technicians willing to do that work for ideological or monetary reasons, or by coercion, is not a trivial problem.
Nothing about the first atomic bombs is secret anymore.
Soviet spies jump started the Soviet nuclear weapons program by a few years at most.
The biggest "secret" was knowing that nuclear weapons could be built.