Oliver Stone’s Devotion to Rewrite American History the Marxist Way

 Scott Johnson in Books, Culture, History     at PowerLine:

Cold War history for left-wing dummies

I think that just about everything President Obama “knows” about American history comes from left-wing academics like American University professor Peter Kuznick, the co-author with Oliver Stone of The Untold History of the United States. The book is a companion to Stone’s Showtime series.

At American University, incidentally, Kuznick teaches the “path-breaking course Oliver Stone’s America.” On Showtime, Stone presents Peter Kuznick’s America. They have got a circle of love kind of thing going between them.

Last week Kuznick and Stone touted the book and the series on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, where the worshipful hosts failed to notice that their guests are whackjobs. Maybe they were impressed by Mikhail Gorbachev’s book blurb: “There is much here to reflect upon. Such a perspective is indispensable.” In any event, cultural artifacts such as the book and the series have done a lot of damage. It is a mistake to ignore them.

The title of the book notwithstanding, historian Ronald Radosh notes that it serves up “A story told before.” Radosh writes: “An examination of the first four episodes and the accompanying 750-page book—The Untold History of the United States (Gallery Books), obviously written by Kuznick, although Stone’s name appears first—reveals them to offer not an untold story, but the all-too-familiar Communist and Soviet line on America’s past as it developed in the early years of the Cold War.” Twice-Told Tales would be more like it:

[H]alf a century ago, when I was in high school, the late Carl Marzani told this very story in We Can Be Friends. A secret member of the American Communist party who had worked during the war in the OSS, Marzani later was proved by evidence from Soviet archives and Venona decryptions to have been a KGB (then the NKVD) operative. His book was published privately by his own Soviet-subsidized firm. It was the first example of what came to be called “Cold War revisionism.” Quoting the memoirs of figures from the Roosevelt and Truman administrations, as well as newspaper stories and magazine articles, Marzani aimed to show that the Cold War had been started by the Truman administration with the intent of destroying a peaceful alliance with the Soviet Union and gaining American hegemony throughout the world.

As it happens, Marzani could have provided Stone’s interpretation of how the Cold War began. Over and over, Stone uses the same quotations, the same arrangements of material, and the same arguments as Marzani. This is not to accuse Stone of plagiarism, only to point out that the case he now offers as new was argued in exactly the same terms by an American Communist and Soviet agent in 1952.

Radosh focuses his review on the series’ treatment of Henry Wallace:

The main hero of the first four episodes is FDR’s secretary of agriculture, then vice president, Henry A. Wallace, whom the book describes as a New Deal “visionary” on domestic policy and a farsighted, anti-imperialist representative of the “common man” on foreign policy.

Hosannas to Wallace are nothing new. In the past decade, scores of books have celebrated his life and record, all in the same mold. They include leftist journalist Richard J. Walton’s Henry Wallace, Harry Truman and the Cold War, Communist historian Norman D. Markowitz’s The Rise and Fall of the People’s Century: Henry A. Wallace and American Liberalism, 1941-1948, a biography by Edward and Frederick Schapsmeier, Prophet in Politics: Henry A. Wallace and the War Years, Allen Yarnell’s Democrats and Progressives: The 1948 Presidential Election as a Test of Postwar Liberalism, and John C. Culver and John Hyde’s American Dreamer: A Life of Henry A. Wallace.

All these books have something in common: They are hagiographic treatments of Wallace as the man who could have brought the United States into permanent peace with the USSR, avoided the Cold War, and created a social democracy at home. For Stone, Wallace was the “nerve center of the New Deal.” At the Department of Agriculture, he used his power to develop new methods of plant fertilization. He opposed racist theories and stood up to party bosses. He was also a great athlete, a reader, and a “spiritual” man. In reality, Wallace was a disciple of the Russian émigré theosophist Nicholas Roerich, whom he addressed as “Dear Guru” in letters published after Roerich’s death, revealing him to be a cheap hustler and a phony who conned a gullible Wallace.

Viewers do not learn that, at the Agriculture Department, Wallace supported what historians call “the purge of the liberals.” Nor was he a radical as Roosevelt’s vice president. Stone omits facts that interfere with his depiction of Wallace as the embodiment of the left wing of the New Deal.

If Wallace was no radical on domestic issues, he did prove to be Stalin’s dupe in foreign affairs. The liberalism he came to espouse was that of the Popular Front, the call for an alliance between Democrats and American Communists and Socialists as the vehicle through which to advance the agenda of FDR’s expanding welfare state. As early as 1943, Wallace warned of “fascist interests motivated largely by anti-Russian bias” who were trying to “get control of our government.” These views are what endear Wallace to Stone.

So enamored of the Soviet Union was the vice president that in May 1944 he traveled to 22 cities in Soviet Siberia. There, the NKVD played Wallace for a fool. He described the slave labor colony of Magadan, which the Soviet secret police had transformed into a Potemkin village staffed by actors and NKVD personnel, as a “combination TVA and Hudson’s Bay Company.”

According to his own testimony, if he had become president, Wallace would have made Harry Dexter White his secretary of the Treasury and given a position in government to Laurence Duggan. Both men were Soviet agents. As a KGB cable found in the Venona archives shows, the Soviets hoped that Duggan would aid them “by using his friendship” with Wallace for “extracting .  .  . interesting information.”

Instead, of course, Roosevelt replaced Wallace with Harry Truman on the Democratic ticket in 1944, and named Wallace secretary of commerce. FDR died on April 12, 1945, and in September 1946, President Truman fired Wallace. The provocation was a speech Wallace gave at a Madison Square Garden rally in which, contrary to administration policy, he called for recognizing Soviet spheres of influence—in effect, occupation zones—as just and necessary. Stone endorses Wallace’s support for turning the nations of Eastern Europe into Soviet pawns, arguing that what Wallace favored was no different from the Russians’ recognition of American influence in the Western hemisphere. Failing to distinguish between democracies and totalitarian regimes, Stone consistently portrays the Soviet Union as the victim of American imperialism, while regarding the monster Stalin as a peaceful leader who sought only to gain valid security guarantees on his borders.

Wallace not only opposed Truman’s decision to block Stalin’s expansionist ambitions, he also spoke of Stalin as a man of peace and Truman as a dangerous militarist. This is the view Stone endorses. But as Notre Dame historian Wilson D. Miscamble demonstrated in From Roosevelt to Truman: Potsdam, Hiroshima and the Cold War, Truman opted for a changed policy only after Stalin showed that his grip on Eastern Europe was nonnegotiable. Historian Fraser Harbutt of Emory University concurred, writing: “Truman genuinely tried to follow Roosevelt’s seemingly conciliatory line toward a Soviet Union whose policies, in the end, left him little alternative but a turn to resistance and thus to the Cold War.”

Two early Cold War episodes illustrate the mendacious method of Stone’s film…

Henry Wallace! I have long thought that Roosevelt’s replacement of Wallace with Truman on the Democratic ticket in 1944 provided irrefutable proof that God looks out for the United States. Wallace was a fool who would have altered the course of history very much for the worse if he had succeeded Roosevelt to the presidency in 1945 instead of Truman. Among other evidence of Wallace’s foolishness, one thinks of Wallace’s 1948 campaign that led him into an alliance with the Communists who, as Radosh notes, were the backbone of the Progressive Party.

In his review of the biography of Wallace by John Culver and John Hyde, cited by Radosh above, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., quoted Wallace’s comment on Roosevelt’s replacement of Wallace on the ticket in 1944:

Wallace was, not unreasonably, bitter about the dissembling manner in which Roosevelt had handled his dismissal. He felt betrayed and, in a remarkable lapse for a man not given to earthy language, wrote in his diary about one of FDR’s explanations, “I did not even think the word ‘bullshit.’”

And so it might be said of Kuznick and Stone’s handiwork, but it probably deserves worse.

Cliff May writes about Stone’s series and Radosh’s review in “Oliver Stone’s party line” and Michael Moynihan takes a critical look at the book from a liberal or libertarian perspective in “Oliver Stone’s junk history of the United States debunked.” Moynihan documents the seriousness with which the book has been treated by the mainstream media. Kuznick and Stone are exploiting the ignorance of many who should know better and many who don’t care to.

Comment:  The most popular assigned “textbook” coast to coast,  that is, not assigned by school authorities  is Communist Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of American Empire.

For  so many Americans, especially those living on black  ONE PARTY  urban  plantations,   and the newly arrived from Mexico, script  succumbed  to cartoon, and  anything resembling truth disappeared into  Marxist Party dogma.

Schools were dummied down to attain equality of national   nonlearning.

Throughout the history of mankind the physically lazy, intellectually narrow (but  consumed by  pride)  have hated and conspired against those who create wealth,  the bourgeoisie primarily caused by greed and jealousy.

Likewise the human female conspired against the human male.

Think Barack Hussein Obama’s hate for the American thinking and creative  businessman and the Obama efforts to weasel as much money out of the man’s  efforts and earnings, and you’ll get the idea.   

MARXISTS AND THEIR ILK THROUGHOUT HISTORY ARE INCAPABLE OF CREATING WEALTH…….THEIR RELIGIOUS DEVOTION IS TO CREATE OBSTACLES FOR THOSE WHO DO CREATE WEALTH AND USURP POWER  OVER  THEM AND THEIR OFF SPRING.

THE ONLY LABOR THEY WORSHIP IS POLITICAL LABOR.   

The current American population is either TOO INHERENTLY DUMB OR TOO  EDUCATIONALLY IGNORANT  to recognize Marxists even  at nose length.   

I prefer not to share with you my guess on the matter at this time.    However, readers should remember that the human female  has not been programmed by birth   to build, to be curious, and to solve problems.   She occupies space and cozies it up.    As she becomes more modern, she becomes more jealous of her mate.    Where she rules, invention disappears.

Human males move elsewhere.

Doubters  should study the histories of Marxism in action over the past century and a half.    The American female doesn’t want to learn about Marx and philosophies  of governing, however.    She prefers to read Jane Austen and cuddle children and look the other way when the culture around her is festering.     She relies on Sir Galahad for rescue.   

But Sir Galahad is too drunk, or he becomes armed and joins  the Taliban.

Ross Douthat: Obama’s Tribalizing America Isn’t a Sure Winner Tomorrow

For the past twenty years or so Democrats have based their Truth on cornering tribes among our once United States of America.    Union power, black power, feminist power, gay and especially lesbian power, and above all atheist power and their wars against traditional American and its Christian posterity.

The Left has also worshipped the power of ignorance arising from the products of the sponge curricula emanating from the  social ‘science’ departments from coast to coast.

Whatever the   modern university teaches outside of the natural sciences, it destroys knowledge, creativity  and truth, especially in the arts and the mastery of  past learnings. 

This American university teaches a one size fits all …..Marxist equality is that size.

Have you ever noticed how many clowns  in Washington’s Congress  are Democrats?    Nancy Pelosi, Maxine Waters,  and now native Indian, Elizabeth Warren?     How about the Dem Congressman who was worried that the island of Guam might tip over into the Pacific Ocean if we increased the number of military stationed there.    Or the female who cheered the end of the Vietnam war culminating in the democratic South and the Communits North?  

Charles Schumer, Dick Durbin, Harry Reid…..need I go on?

Dennis Prager is a conservative, dear readers.   He has no counter soul throughout the Lefty Obama world.    They must rely on fomenting hate and division to win elections not on selling Marxism.    Truth is difficult to disguise all of the time.     Despite the present day American ONE PARTY press, ONE PARTY university and school systems, ONE PARTY crone big business, entertainment and  art world, all aiding to destroy  America’s  memory of Marxism in action,  the tyranny of Barack Hussein Obama’s administration will not be forgotten.

Nearly 60,000,000 votes AGAINST Barack Hussein’s administration is an impressive figure despite the arrogant claims among Obamalings that conservatism in America is dead.

Please read the following outstanding article by Ross Douthat about the only conservative allowed to write columns at the New York Times:

THE LIBERAL GLOAT

By ROSS DOUTHAT   at the New York Times:

WINNING an election doesn’t just offer the chance to govern the country. It offers a chance to feel morally and intellectually superior to the party you’ve just beaten. This is an inescapable aspect of democratic culture: no matter what reason tells us about the vagaries of politics, something in the American subconscious assumes that the voice of the people really is the voice of God, and that being part of a winning coalition must be a sign that you’re His chosen one as well.

 This means the losing coalition must be doomed to wander east of Eden, and liberals have been having a good time with this idea of late. “Those poor, benighted Republicans!” runs the subtext of their postelection commentary. “They can’t read polls! They can’t reach Hispanics! They don’t understand women! They don’t have a team of Silicon Valley sorcerers running their turnout operations!”

Back in 2011, the Obama White House earned some mild mockery for its “win the future” slogan. But now that the president has been re-elected, the liberal conventional wisdom is that the Democrats have done just that — that Republicans are now Radio Shack to their Apple store, “The Waltons” to their “Modern Family,” a mediocre Norman Rockwell to their digital-age mosaic.

Maybe it’s too soon to pierce this cloud of postelection smugness. But in the spirit of friendly correction — or, O.K., maybe curmudgeonly annoyance — let me point out some slightly more unpleasant truths about the future that liberalism seems to be winning.

Liberals look at the Obama majority and see a coalition bound together by enlightened values — reason rather than superstition, tolerance rather than bigotry, equality rather than hierarchy. But it’s just as easy to see a coalition created by social disintegration and unified by economic fear.

Consider the Hispanic vote. Are Democrats winning Hispanics because they put forward a more welcoming face than Republicans do — one more in keeping with America’s tradition of assimilating migrants yearning to breathe free? Yes, up to a point. But they’re also winning recent immigrants because those immigrants often aren’t assimilating successfully — or worse, are assimilating downward, thanks to rising out-of-wedlock birthrates and high dropout rates. The Democratic edge among Hispanics depends heavily on these darker trends: the weaker that families and communities are, the more necessary government support inevitably seems.

Likewise with the growing number of unmarried Americans, especially unmarried women. Yes, social issues like abortion help explain why these voters lean Democratic. But the more important explanation is that single life is generally more insecure and chaotic than married life, and single life with children — which is now commonplace for women under 30 — is almost impossible to navigate without the support the welfare state provides.

Or consider the secular vote, which has been growing swiftly and tilts heavily toward Democrats. The liberal image of a non-churchgoing American is probably the “spiritual but not religious” seeker, or the bright young atheist reading Richard Dawkins. But the typical unchurched American is just as often an underemployed working-class man, whose secularism is less an intellectual choice than a symptom of his disconnection from community in general.

What unites all of these stories is the growing failure of America’s local associations — civic, familial, religious — to foster stability, encourage solidarity and make mobility possible.

This is a crisis that the Republican Party often badly misunderstands, casting Democratic-leaning voters as lazy moochers or spoiled children seeking “gifts” (as a certain former Republican presidential nominee would have it) rather than recognizing the reality of their economic struggles.

But if conservatives don’t acknowledge the crisis’s economic component, liberalism often seems indifferent to its deeper social roots. The progressive bias toward the capital-F Future, the old left-wing suspicion of faith and domesticity, the fact that Democrats have benefited politically from these trends — all of this makes it easy for liberals to just celebrate the emerging America, to minimize the costs of disrupted families and hollowed-out communities, and to treat the places where Americans have traditionally found solidarity outside the state (like the churches threatened by the Obama White House’s contraceptive mandate) as irritants or threats.

This is a great flaw in the liberal vision, because whatever role government plays in prosperity, transfer payments are not a sufficient foundation for middle-class success. It’s not a coincidence that the economic era that many liberals pine for — the great, egalitarian post-World War II boom — was an era that social conservatives remember fondly as well: a time of leaping church attendance, rising marriage rates and birthrates, and widespread civic renewal and engagement.

No such renewal seems to be on the horizon. That isn’t a judgment on the Obama White House, necessarily. But it is a judgment on a certain kind of blithe liberal optimism, and the confidence with which many Democrats assume their newly emerged majority is a sign of progress rather than decline.

I invite you to follow me on Twitter at twitter.com/DouthatNYT

A Good Word for John Boehner……Force Obama to Lead

…….and Not from Behind.   

There’s a major  problem.   Does the president have any intention or ability to solve anything?

Boehner’s Wise Play

By Salena Zito –   at the Pittsburg Tribune-Review

……John Boehner didn’t awake one morning to find himself Speaker of the House; he got there through a series of tough setbacks that took him from leadership at a young age to being just one of 435 congressmen and back again, with plenty of declarations that his career had fizzled.

His fellow Republicans understand that, too – which is why, when House Majority Leader Eric Cantor nominated him last week to retain his speakership, Boehner was greeted with a warm standing ovation. He will be formally elected by a vote in the House when the 113th Congress convenes in January.

Many reporters, hung-over conservatives and the “Twitterverse” have questioned why Boehner called on President Obama to step up with a solution to the nation’s pending “fiscal cliff,” rather than taking the lead himself.

What they do not understand is that, for Boehner, it was the only way back to a position of power for his party.

He may be taking his cues from a legendary predecessor – Tip O’Neill.

Republicans emerged from the 1980 presidential election with substantial gains; they held the White House, seized control of the U.S. Senate, and gained a staggering 33 seats in the House, although that chamber remained controlled by Democrats with O’Neill as its new Speaker.

Most headlines of the day described Democrats in the bleakest of terms, not much different from today’s headlines about Republicans.

O’Neill understood those bruising losses marked the beginning of a comeback, at least in the House. And he knew the best thing was to allow Reagan to take the lead on the economy and taxes.

Two years later, after taking all of the risks, Reagan also took all of the political hits; Democrats picked up 27 House seats in mid-term elections, leaving the GOP with the fewest seats they have held between 1980 and today.

Reagan had no choice but to bargain with Democrats.

Boehner – the son of a bar owner and one of 12 children in a Democrat household in suburban Cincinnati – is now the Republican Party’s de facto leader, the one left to work with the president on averting a fiscal plunge.

His smartest move came the day after the election, when he pushed the leadership mantle onto President Obama.

“We’re ready to be led, not as Democrats or Republicans, but as Americans,” Boehner declared. “We want you to lead — not as a liberal or a conservative, but as the president of the United States of America.”

He essentially told the president, “Fine, Obama, let’s go. We’re waiting for you to lead, and we can’t wait to hear your ideas.”

Boehner knows he has no political capital to expend right now, but Obama has plenty. The Ohio congressman has a demoralized party, spooked by its losses, and he knows the only reason Republicans still hold the House is because of a crazy little thing called gerrymandering.

Boehner would keep losing if he believed he had just won simply because he holds a House majority. So if he wants to lead, he has to step back and allow Obama to lose his lead.

That’s why a walk through the halls of Capitol Hill found a growing number of House members, in leadership and on the bench, more than willing to back up the Speaker on his call for the president to “bring it on” when it comes to offering up some substantial solutions.

One of those is U.S. Senator Pat Toomey, R-Pa.

“Boehner is right,” he said in an interview with the Trib. “The president keeps reminding us he just won an election. It’s time for the president to start talking about what he has to offer and put something on the table.” 

Salena Zito is a Pittsburgh Tribune-Review editorial page columnist. E-mail her at szito@tribweb.com

Wisdom Arrives From Prague……about the recent intelligence of the American electorate

Obama’s America: The View from Prague

Courtesy of some Facebook friends, a translation of an editorial from the Czech newspaper Prager Zeitungon:

“The danger to America is not Barack Obama, but a citizenry capable of entrusting a man like him with the Presidency.  It will be far easier to limit and undo the follies of an Obama presidency than to restore the necessary common sense and good judgment to a depraved electorate willing to have such a man for their president.  The problem is much deeper and far more serious than Mr. Obama, who is a mere symptom of what ails America.  Blaming the prince of the fools should not blind anyone to the vast confederacy of fools that made him their prince.  The Republic can survive a Barack Obama, who is, after all, merely a fool.  It is less likely to survive a multitude of fools, such as those who made him their president.”

 

Thanks go to our Prager ally in California, Lisa Rich for forwarding this timely translation from Prague.