Harry Targ
Oliver Stone has made an enormous contribution to
discussions of the United States role in the world. His films have described
the horrific consequences of United States foreign policy for the people of El
Salvador and Vietnam, the American political system, and the U.S. soldiers
victimized by wars not of their making. While his films, such as JFK, raise controversial claims, they have
stimulated important public conversations.
This television season, Showtime, a cable channel,
is showing a ten-part series written and produced by Stone and his academic
collaborator, historian Peter Kuznick. The series, “The Untold History of the
United States,” is a brilliant and entertaining narrative of the United States
role in the world since the onset of World War II. It warrants broad distribution
within educational institutions and among communities of political activists. Because
of our ahistorical culture people do not have a sense of the critical decisions
that were made fifty or a hundred years ago which have structured the political
and economic life of the country ever since.
Critical moments in United States history have
channeled the prospects for progressive social change today and tomorrow. From
the arrival of colonial armies to the “new world,” to the introduction of
slavery to the Western Hemisphere, to revolution against British imperialism,
to the civil war and the defeat of post-war reconstruction, the American
experience has been shaped by class and race in the context of burgeoning
industrial and financial capitalism. The Spanish/Cuban/American war stimulated
the rise of the United States as the preeminent empire from the Philippines to
the Western Hemisphere.
Most of us have received a sanitized history of
these earlier historical moments. In addition, our understanding of the rise of
socialist movements in the 1930s in response to the Great Depression and the global
fascist threat, the realities of World War II, and the emerging U.S. hegemony
after the war which led to the “Cold War” between global capitalism and
socialism have been limited as well. Oliver Stone’s ten-part “untold history,”
in collaboration with Professor Kuznick, fills in some of the void. Several themes
about the onset of the Cold War are particularly important:
First, while the series overemphasizes the role of
elites in shaping U.S. history Stone and Kuznick do point out that these elites
always perceived the threat workers, radicals, and other rank-and-file
activists meant to ruling class dominance. Much of foreign policy was designed
to crush revolutionary ferment overseas and
at home.
Second, in the first two episodes emphasis is placed
on the lost opportunity for the left that resulted from the successful efforts
of political elites, particularly in the Democratic Party, to force Henry
Wallace, President Roosevelt’s third term vice president, and 1948 candidate
for president on the Progressive Party ticket, from power. Wallace as Secretary
of Agriculture during the New Deal was an economic populist, anti-racist, and pro-union
sympathizer and after World War II an advocate for United States/Soviet
Union collaboration.
Stone and Kuznick probably exaggerate Wallace as an
alternative to the imperial, counter-revolutionary, and racist path the United
States took after the war but correctly make it clear that CEOs from massive
corporations and banks and political elites from both political parties were
committed to crushing those left forces that flowered in the United States in
the 1930s and grew in popularity all across the globe. The Soviet Union was one
manifestation of global resistance to capitalism that paralleled the spread of massive
anti-colonial ferment in the Global South.
Third, the film makers provide overwhelming evidence
to show that the defeat of fascism in Europe was largely the result of the
massive Soviet military machine. Americans suffered about 290,000 wartime dead
and the Soviet Union 27 million. And Stone, who narrated the documentary,
suggests that while Joseph Stalin was a cruel dictator, his policies must be
understood in the context of the rise of fascism in Europe and the refusal of
western powers, particularly Great Britain, France, and the United State, to
stand up against it. He correctly portrays Stalin as a nationalist who was
prepared to sacrifice all principles, in this case Communist ones, to prepare
for and to defend the Soviet Union. This overriding commitment, Stone implies,
carried over into Soviet diplomatic interaction with the rest of Europe and the
United States after the war.
Fourth, in great detail Stone and Kuznick make it
clear that the United States did not have to use two atomic bombs over
Hiroshima and Nagasaki to force the Japanese to surrender in the summer of
1945. The Japanese leadership knew they were soon to be defeated. Many had
advocated for surrender by the time of the Potsdam Conference of July, 1945 and
American policymakers were aware of it.
President Truman’s advisors knew that if the Soviet
Union declared war on Japan which the Soviets promised to do by August 8, the
enemy would give up. But despite this, the film makers suggest, President
Truman tried to use the powerful new weapon against the Japanese before the
Soviet Union had a chance to enter the war, and thus be a diplomatic player in
Asia after the war. Also, and this was critical, the bomb was designed to send
a message to the Soviet Union as well as Japan. The United States in the years
ahead would be the dominant military power in the world.
Stone and Kuznick point out that the decisions to
drop two atomic bombs on Japan signaled the dawn of a new age. Now weapons of
mass destruction would be used to pursue global hegemony. There no longer would
be any limits on the possibility of death and destruction derived from world
affairs.
In other words, Stone and Kuznick are making the
case that at least from the onset of the Cold War to today, U.S. foreign policy
has been driven by economic and political interests to dominate the world and
has responded violently to a multiplicity of forms of resistance. The locales
of struggle changed as would the forms of resistance. But the structure that
was put in place after World War II remains the albatross around the necks of
those who seek change today and tomorrow.
The series is an indispensable lesson for peace and
justice activists today. However, it should be added that the “untold” story
has been told before. As a result of the threats of nuclear war in the 1950s,
United States policies toward Cuba and Vietnam in the 1960s, and patterns of
U.S. covert interventions and violence against peoples on every continent,
progressive scholars began to use their methods to uncover this history fifty
years ago.
Historians and activists were inspired by the
classic text by William Appleman Williams, The
Tragedy of American Diplomacy. Williams’ work, called then “historical revisionism,”
inspired other groundbreaking studies of the onset and perpetuation of the Cold
War by Joyce and Gabriel Kolko, Gar Alperovitz, Diane Clemens, Lloyd Gardner,
Walter LaFeber, Thomas Patterson, and many more. The works on McCarthyism,
repression of labor militancy, and mystification in popular culture could fill
libraries.
While it is true that documentary films cannot
provide footnotes, it is important for viewers to realize that progressive scholars
during the depths of the Cold War used their skills to research, teach, and for
some, engage in political activism based on their findings.
And finally, if the “untold” story has in fact been
told many times, a question that becomes important is why we as a people, even
the political activists among us, are not apprised of it. And this leads to
analyses of how knowledge has been appropriated in the service of United States
foreign and domestic policy.
