Oliver Stone's 'Secret History' to put Hitler 'in context'

http://www.thrfeed.com/2010/01/oliver-stone-history-america.html

Oliver Stone's 'Secret History' to put Hitler 'in context'

TCA -- Director Oliver Stone's upcoming Showtime documentary miniseries "Secret History of America" promises to put mass murderers such as Stalin and Hitler "in context."

"Stalin, Hitler, Mao, McCarthy -- these people have been vilified pretty thoroughly by history," Stone told reporters at the Television Critics Association's semi-annual press tour in Pasadena.

"Stalin has a complete other story," Stone said. "Not to paint him as a hero, but to tell a more factual representation. He fought the German war machine more than any single person. We can't judge people as only 'bad' or 'good.' Hitler is an easy scapegoat throughout history and its been used cheaply. He's the product of a series of actions. It's cause and effect ... People in America don't know the connection between WWI and WWII ... I've been able to walk in Stalin's shoes and Hitler's shoes to understand their point of view. We're going to educate our minds and liberalize them and broaden them. We want to move beyond opinions ... Go into the funding of the Nazi party. How many American corporations were involved, from GM through IBM. Hitler is just a man who could have easily been assassinated."

The controversial director's 10-part documentary series for Showtime promises to focus on events that "at the time went under-reported, but crucially shaped America's unique and complex history of the last 60 years." Subjects in "History" include President Harry Truman’s decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan and the origins of the Cold War with the Soviet Union.

"You cannot approach history unless you have empathy for the person you may hate," Stone said during the show's trailer, which promised to put historical villains "in context." "I don't want to put out conventional History Channel product where it's easy to like it."

"He's not saying we're going to come out with a more positive view of Hitler," emphasized professor Peter Kuznick, the lead writer on the project. "But we're going to describe him as a historical phenomenon and not just somebody who appeared out of nowhere."

Stone said that conservative pundits will dislike the show.

"Obviously, Rush Limbaugh is not going to like this history and, as usual, we're going to get those kind of ignorant attacks," said Stone, who also also compared the experience of sympathizing with war criminals to making his "W" movie about George W. Bush. "I'm trying to understand somebody I thoroughly despised."

Stone also warned that the same military industrial complex forces that he's explored in movies such as "JFK" and in "Secret History," are now corrupting Barack Obama.

"You can understand why Obama is following in Bush's footsteps in Afghanistan," Stone said."Obama is very much trapped, we believe, in that system. And so that's what we're going to try and show you -- the way it works."

The project will also show lesser-known positive aspects of American history and unsung heroes. Stone eventually hopes to send "Secret History" to schools as a teaching curriculum.

"It would be a very different counterweight to what they're learning," Stone said. "Nobody is going to force it down anybody's throat."

A critic also asked Stone "the Sarah Palin question" of what he likes to read.

"My father was a voracious New York Times reader," he said. "We consider that in The Middle. Sarah Palin would disagree."

 

Stone needs professional help and some serious medication to overcome his obvious mental health issues.

 

I think that's the point.

 

Very

 

I think that context is great. I think that it's entirely reasonable to try to understand someone, even if you despise her.

I am not at all concerned with that aspect of the approach. It's just that Stone has a long history of playing loose with facts and has a clear agenda. Those two things might make for an entertaining historical-based story, but... not for history.

The primary danger is that people will treat it as history, as people do with Jon Stewart on the Daily Show as news.

Ed O.

 

D'oh!

Stone eventually hopes to send "Secret History" to schools as a teaching curriculum.

"It would be a very different counterweight to what they're learning," Stone said. "Nobody is going to force it down anybody's throat."

 

You're right...but uh, the Nazi's did execute Barbarossa...and got to within sight of the Kremlin. One of the more impressive things in military history.

Of course, starting it 2 months late b/c Hitler flipped out on Yugoslavia was kind of a bonehead move.

And he was sending Hitler war materiel for 2 years---the tanks invading June 22, 1941 passed trains with Soviet supplies coming West to Berlin.

 

One thing that underscores a main difference b/w my belief system and that of many liberals...I believe that humans are, by nature, bad. Naturally depraved. By grace able to do good things. Stone seems to think that there's "understanding" and "context" about Hitler. There is: he's a depraved failure of a man who through an immensely improbable series of events (some of which were due to his genius) he was able to carve out for himself absolute power over the life and death of every person who lived in German-occupied territory. And along the way, whacked-out ideologies he'd invented for himself (or twisted from other clowns) were able to be implemented without the possibility of being stopped.

He wasn't an innocent soul who somehow did bad things. He was a depraved man (like all of us) whose power wasn't checked.

 

The crazy thing is: there is more hard-and-fast documentation on the Third Reich than any other period, event or person in history. Diaries, dispatches, official documents, back-channel documents, important players, role players, transcripts, meeting minutes, etc...it's one thing to say you've come across something no one's ever seen before and to make it available for the masses, another completely to make "an Oliver Stone joint" about WWII and Hitler/Stalin a focus of 10 or so high-school classes.

 

Churchill fought the German war machine more than anyone else, and it's not close.

Russia was never Hitler's priority: not fighting a two-front war was. He got the Soviets to buy into the partition of Poland and watched them take over the Baltic states, attack Finland and carve up Eastern Europe while he was holding the French and British at bay in 1939. Then Russia stood by and watched (sending him war materiel) as he invaded the neutrality of Scandinavia and the Low Countries and took over France. Stalin didn't side with the Allies even when the Luftwaffe was conducting missions in Russia in the spring of 1941. Barbarossa was pushed back time and again b/c he hadn't completely conquered Britian and Greece was still holding out against Mussolini. He didn't even insist to the Japanese that they declare war against Russia when he declared war against the US after Pearl Harbor.

Sure, many more Russians than Americans died in WWII. Sure, Hitler hated the Russians and wanted the Lebensraum as well as the natural resources of Russia. But that doesn't make Stalin some kind of Anti-Nazi Hero.

"I've been able to walk in Hitler's and Stalin's shoes"?!? Tell me, Oliver, what does a megalomaniacal dictator with a penchant for holocaust think about? And how did McCarthy get lumped in with guys who killed millions of their own citizens?