Posted on 01/13/2010 9:54:17 AM PST by AJKauf
As was recently announced, Stone hopes to “to put mass murderers such as Stalin and Hitler ‘in context.’” Or as Stone himself puts it: “Stalin, Hitler, Mao, McCarthy — these people have been vilified pretty thoroughly by history.” Always the skeptical contrarian, Stone evidently believes that if the majority of historians see them in any but a favorable light, it is time to reevaluate them.
“Stalin,” he says, “has a complete other story.” Sure, and it is one being told today by contemporary Russian apologists who long for the good old days of the Gulag, as well as by a scant number of the still existing fans of Stalin in our country, such as an obscure English professor at Montclair State University in New Jersey and, of course, the apologist for the Vietnamese Communists, H. Bruce Franklin, author of The Essential Stalin (1972). In that book, Franklin wrote: “I used to think of Joseph Stalin as a tyrant and butcher who jailed and killed millions. … But, to about a billion people today, Stalin is the opposite of what we in the capitalist world have been programmed to believe. … If we are to understand Stalin at all, and evaluate him from the point of view of either of the two major opposing classes, we must see him, like all historical figures, as a being created by his times and containing the contradictions of those times. … From a Communist point of view, Stalin was certainly one of the greatest of revolutionary leaders. …”
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(Excerpt) Read more at pajamasmedia.com ...
Why not, Jon Stewart’s show is considered “news” < /sarcasm>
Unless your name is Dick Nixon.
“Or as Stone himself puts it: “Stalin, Hitler, Mao, McCarthy — these people have been vilified pretty thoroughly by history.””
For $500, in the category of “responsible for the deaths of millions of people”, which of the names above does NOT belong - oh, so sorry, Oliver, you don’t advance to the next round of Jeopardy.
I actually found that Stone was much more respectful to Nixon in that movie than most, especially if you saw the end of the movie.
Ahh yes. The latest flavor of leftist "no personal accountability for his choices and actions" Kool-Aid.
Like all the other variants, it smells like BS.
I fully expect Stone’s next work to show how Joseph McCarthy was right about communist in the film and media world. After all, there are two sides to every story, right Oliver?
Frankly I gave up Stone movies halfway through Born of the Fourth of July.
It was just playing on TV one day, and I thought, what the heck, I’ll watch it just to see how much of a monster Stone made Nixon out to be, I was quite surprised I must say how kind he actually was to Nixon.
"Boy, I just saw Oliver Stone's JFK last night, and I am furious! I don't know why I never learned that history!"
"Yeah, you'll never read the truth about things like that in a conservative newspaper like the New York Times."
It was one of those "it's hopeless" moments for me. I've had many since.
Hollyweird elitist windbag - stick to what you’re good at Stone - creating make-believe.
You do realize that every single Hollywood moron and leftist politician that has gone to Cuba has been thoroughly compromised and blackmailed? That Cuba has spent a great deal of it’s treasury and intelligence in doing that?
Stone’s SALVADOR was a Leftist freak fantasy. Even at the border crossing leading into El Salvador he had the “hero” witness a summary execution and a burning cadaver. So just think how bad it was once he got outside the watchful eyes of Guatemala’s border police.
I liked Scarface
“Back, and to the left.”
Such is where culture drifts when influenced by “JFK” flim-flammer Oliver Stone.
“Back, and to the left.”
Could you please expand on that? Totally unaware of anything like that happening to some of the scum the Castros have entertained.
What a joke. The Germans initially drove deep into the USSR, surrounding and capturing hundreds of thousands of Soviet troops, because Stalin was completely unprepared. He ignored intelligence indicating an invasion was imminent. He had gutted his officer corps with his obsessive purges. He thought he was so smart because his cynical nonaggression pact deliberately gave a free hand to the Nazis to invade the Western democracies he hated. When Germany was finally defeated, his Red Army enslaved millions of east Europeans. He then authorized the invasion of South Korea. The millions who went to the gulag were not merely "in jail." There were no TVs, lawyers, and weight rooms in the gulag. People were worked in bitter cold until they died. Stalin was a mass murderer who was surpassed only by Mao. He was utterly evil.
OK, but that was before Platoon & BOTFOJ.
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