Cold Stoned Foolery
Contributed by Mike Walker, Col. USMC (retired)
Contributed by Mike Walker, Col. USMC (retired)
All,
On occasion, a lie provides a clarity that the truth can never reveal.
Oliver Stone is the master of the self-defeating lie. The movie "JFK" had to be his touchstone of silliness. It also captured the cleverness of his mischief.
In the movie, he created the nonsense about the assassin’s “magic bullet” that moved in impossible three-dimensional right angles to wound both President Kennedy and Governor Connelly. “WE MUST HAVE BEEN LIED TO!” was the only possible verdict. That was indeed true, but the only trickster was Oliver Stone.
He simply switched the Presidential limousine with another seemingly “look-alike” Lincoln limousine to create his illusion. What one-in-a-billion movie viewer could have possibly known that Connelly’s seat had been moved up and over by Oliver to give us a “stoned” version of the truth?
We have only ourselves to be blamed for being duped in such a manner. At least comedian Jerry Seinfeld gave us a “warning to beware” with his satirical “magic loogie” scene a year later. The joke was on us.
Now we have “Oliver Stone’s Untold History of America” or, be more precise, “Oliver Stone’s Mistold History of America.”
Where to begin with the intellectual dishonesty? How about World War II?
The truth is that Stalin pursued a policy of brutal aggression from the late 1920’s until the day he died in 1953.
In 1939, Josef Stalin rejected the Western Democracies and embraced Adolf Hitler. That was the catalyst that sparked the most terrible of wars.
Stalin’s Union of Soviet Socialist Republics entered the Second World War in September 1939 as an ally of Adolf Hitler’s Nationalist Socialist Germany with goal of carving up Poland and enslaving the free peoples of the Baltic States.
Do not believe the lie that Soviet war began on 22 June 1941 with a German invasion. 22 June 1941 simply marked the date that one evil villain (Hitler) first betrayed another evil villain (Stalin) in the middle of World War II.
The Second World War marked the high water mark of the radical socialist movements that dominated the wars of the 20th century, the most violent century in human history.
Perhaps the only thing the radical socialist leaders of the 20th century had in common (the nationalist socialists reflected in Hitler and Mussolini and the communist socialists Stalin and Mao Zedung) was an utter and complete contempt for Western Democracies defined by Canada, France, the United Kingdom, the United States and others.
I could go on, but by now you see the point: The Cold War as born and sustained in Stalin’s Kremlin NOT Ottawa, Paris, No. 10 Downing Street or the White House.
There are many attributes that can be assigned to Stone: Stunning artistic intensity, vision, even genius, to name a few.
When it comes to history, however, the unforgiving truth is that Oliver is a second-rate shrill peddling a stale tale that was dubious the first time around during the Cold War and is only plain goofy in the retelling.
If you to wish view the farce on Showtime then laugh if you don’t remember the horrors and cry if you do. Just do not believe anything you are watching.
Semper Fi,
Mike
