Oliver Stone talking:
The trailer looked pretty epic. From here to here—it’s like a Cecil B. DeMille movie, from 1940s to—it was a big job, four-and-a-half years, off and on. I did do three feature films and two documentaries during that period. But Peter was on the—we started in 2008, and it’s been four-and-a-half.
We recently discussed Wallace and the bomb in 1997, when he was teaching at American University and I was there in one of his classes. And we talked about making a documentary of about an hour, hour and a half. He’s an expert on the atomic—on weaponry, and especially the atomic bomb. He founded the Department of Nuclear Studies in American—and Wallace is—Henry Wallace, as he can explain to you, is a key to the link: Would we have dropped the bomb? That’s the origin myths of this. Every school kid—still, my daughter in her school, in private school, in good school, is still learning this: We dropped the bomb because we had to, because the Japanese resistance was fanatic, and we would have lost many American lives taking Japan. This is one—there’s no alternative to that story. And we are beginning the process in chapter one, two and three of saying the bomb did not have to be dropped for strategic reasons and also because it was morally reprehensible. But strategically, it made no sense.
Peter Kuznick talking:
The trailer looked pretty epic. From here to here—it’s like a Cecil B. DeMille movie, from 1940s to—it was a big job, four-and-a-half years, off and on. I did do three feature films and two documentaries during that period. But Peter was on the—we started in 2008, and it’s been four-and-a-half.
We recently discussed Wallace and the bomb in 1997, when he was teaching at American University and I was there in one of his classes. And we talked about making a documentary of about an hour, hour and a half. He’s an expert on the atomic—on weaponry, and especially the atomic bomb. He founded the Department of Nuclear Studies in American—and Wallace is—Henry Wallace, as he can explain to you, is a key to the link: Would we have dropped the bomb? That’s the origin myths of this. Every school kid—still, my daughter in her school, in private school, in good school, is still learning this: We dropped the bomb because we had to, because the Japanese resistance was fanatic, and we would have lost many American lives taking Japan. This is one—there’s no alternative to that story. And we are beginning the process in chapter one, two and three of saying the bomb did not have to be dropped for strategic reasons and also because it was morally reprehensible. But strategically, it made no sense.
It made no sense because the Japanese were already defeated. They were looking for a way out of the war. United States knew they were defeated. Truman refers to the intercepted July 18th telegram as “the telegram from the Jap emperor asking for peace.”
The Japanese, yeah, but that was called—he says “the Jap emperor asking for peace,” is Truman’s exact words on that. Everybody else knew that they were militarily defeated and looking for a way out. But the people who knew that the best were the Russians, because they were trying to get the Russians to intervene on their behalf to get them better surrender terms, and also because—their strategy was to welcome American invasion and then to conflict heavy damages and then force better surrender terms. But once the Russians invaded, then that undermined both their diplomatic strategy and their military strategy. So that was what really ended the war. It was not the bombing. We had already been bombing Japanese cities. We had firebombed over a hundred cities. Destruction reached 99.5 percent of the city of Toyama. From the Japanese standpoint, whether it was 200 bombs—200 planes and a thousand bombs or one plane and one bomb didn’t change the equation. But the Soviet invasion fundamentally changed it, and that’s what forced the final surrender. In Manchuria on August 9.
Oliver Stone talking:
It’s a huge—a huge—Stalin moved a huge army to the East off the German—from the German frontier to the—and wiped out the Kwantung Army in about, I think two days or one day.
And it was moving towards Japan. So, if you let a month go by, you know, if we really are interested in ending this war and using Russian troops, it’s perfect. We can do it.
we deal with the three empires, Britain and the U.S. and the rivalry between the U.S. and Britain. And a lot of school kids don’t know that the British Empire is a dominant empire and has so many resources around the world. And Churchill is fighting, among other things, for the retention of the colonies and, all through the Middle East, the oil supplies, Greece, very important, North Africa, Egypt, Suez, India, Singapore. And that’s what he’s trying to get back. And he never—he never starts the Second Front for about two years. It’s been promised in ’42 to Stalin. Stalin is, meanwhile, rolling the Germans back and winning the war, as the British and the Americans are “periphery pecking” in retaining the British colonies for Britain. So, interesting story, the British, for example, go into Athens in 1944, after they’ve liberated it, so to speak, but they end up fighting in street battles with the communist resistance fighters who fought very heroically against the Nazis. We put in a—we put in a Nazi—a Greek who was working with the Nazis. Right away, we put him into the premiership. It’s a dirty story, dirty story.
Peter Kuznick talking:
What most Americans don’t know about the war—most Americans think that the United States won the war. But the reality is that through most of the war, the American and British combined were fighting 10 German divisions; the Russians alone were fighting 200 German divisions. That’s why Churchill says it was the Russians who tore the guts out of the Nazi army.
Oliver Stone talking:
I would say the inspiration was the bomb, which is perhaps—the atomic bomb, because I grew up right in that period. I was born right after it. And I wanted to know—the bomb shaped all our lives, and we lived in fear of it as we were in school—air raids, we came near the Cuban missile crisis—and it haunts our policy. We were in a cold war up until 1989, ’91, with the Soviets. But it continues on, if you noticed. I mean, there was no peace dividend. And I’m wondering what happened in the 1989, ’91 period, all the way through the ’90s. And it just keeps going into the war on terror, the war on Noriega, the war on drugs. So, you go back. And I talked to Peter, and he knows a lot about the bomb. And did the bomb have to start all this? And do we have to keep doing this?
And the bomb is what leads you to Wallace, because Wallace was a key figure. He was supposed to be vice president in 1944, the popular choice; 65 percent of the Democratic voters wanted him. Two percent wanted Truman. And it’s an inside deal. It’s really ugly. It’s like a Frank Capra movie, where everything is rigged from the inside. And on one particular night, it comes down to a moment in time, like nine seconds, when Wallace almost makes it. He almost squeezes in. The crowd is cheering, “Wallace! Wallace!” And the bosses convene the convention that night, and then overnight they turn the—they turn favors and so forth and money and bribes. So Wallace does not end up as vice president. Roosevelt dies, and a little unknown party hack, really, called Harry Truman, at one of the most important times in the history of the world, becomes—a small man becomes leader of the world, with all the power, and, frankly, like a George Bush, he blows it.
He would, but as unsuccessful third-party candidate, and he was smeared repeatedly as a communist at that point. But the real drama is the ’44 convention.
Peter Kuznick talking:
And Wallace was very much of a visionary. He’s been lost to history. When I ask my students and other people, nobody knows Henry Wallace anymore. He was an extraordinary man. When Henry Luce in 1941 said the 20th century must be the American century, the United States could dominate the world in every way, Wallace countered as vice president, when he gave his famous speech, when he said the 20th century must be the century of the common man. He calls for a worldwide people’s revolution in the tradition of the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the Latin American Revolution and the Russian Revolution. He says we have to wipe out monopolies and cartels.
Not bad versus all the monopolies and cartels. He says we’ve got to end colonialism, end imperialism, raise standards of livings around the world. And the U.S. and the Soviets have to collaborate to refashion the world at the end of the world. That was the vision that he had. The party bosses hated him, as did the Wall Street people. Wallace said that America’s fascists are those who think Wall Street comes first and the country comes second. The anti-labor people hated him. The people against civil rights hated him. And the people who were against women’s rights hated him. He was the exemplar of everything good that the Democratic Party has ever stood for.
Oliver Stone talking:
Ronald Reagan set American policy back like 20 years. There had been attempts at détente, and he took the Cold War to a new level. He almost took it to the edge of world war again. You know, he said—constantly he said that the Soviet Union was ahead of the United States in every military capacity. And he pumped up—but we never were. In all this time, these 80—70 years since the Cold War, we were always ahead. But we were always the underdog in our own mind. So, Central America, in Reagan’s mind, becomes the bulwark of communists in this country: We’re being threatened again; they’re coming in; the Sandinistas in Nicaragua are very dangerous, to the underbelly of Texas and Arizona; they’re going to come up. He’s worried about Guatemala. He’s worried about Honduras going—going red, and Salvador, very important. So he starts, basically, a dirty war in these Central American countries.
I was there. That’s when I went back to the—I made a film called Salvador and hung out, and I saw soldiers that reminded me of my own experience in Vietnam, young soldiers in the streets of Tegucigalpa walking around lost, white skin and all that, and saying, “What are you doing here?” You know, they don’t know. And I asked them, “Do you remember Vietnam?” And they shrugged. They said, “Not really. We don’t know much about it,” or, “We don’t want to discuss it, sir.” So, it was death squads, terror. The right-wing parties of Central America took their nod from Reagan and killed a lot of—in Guatamala, it was the bloodiest, but certainly Nicaragua, the Contra war, was a dirty war.
South of the Border was many years later, yeah. That’s in the 1990s. That comes out of the economics of Reagan. The—South America was decimated by the—really, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank played a huge role. And the people turned against it. These are democratically elected new leaders in the 21st century. They came in because of the policies, disastrous policies, of Reagan.
We live inside now a—no longer a national security state. I think it’s a global security state. Obama has made it very clear, as did Romney, that it’s about American power. We are the, quote, “indispensable” nation in the world, which is a form of American exceptionalism. And he made it very clear that he is going to take troops and so forth out of Afghanistan and Iraq, but he is committing, on a full-spectrum dominance, to a containment of China. He said it. Hillary Clinton has said the 21st century will be America’s Pacific century, which is a version, an echo, of Henry Luce’s statement. So, it doesn’t end. And we’re going to—and you’ll see Obama, I think, is going to move—make alliances, treaties with countries all around the world. He’s already expanding the Bush version of security. You know about the terror state. I guess you have done shows about—he hasn’t gone back on any of the civil liberty laws.
Peter Kuznick talking:
And he’s expanded it. We were so critical of Bush for doing surveillance against people without judicial review. Obama is targeting and killing people without judicial review. We’re acting as judge, jury and executioner now.
Oliver Stone talking:
people will hate us more for doing this, and we’re invading the sovereignty of Pakistan and Yemen and so many countries. I mean, the United States is acting with impunity. But the bigger issue is simply that there has been never—in the history of empires, and they’ve all fallen, no one has a monopoly on any weapon ever, and whether it’s the atomic bomb—was copied—or the hydrogen bomb. Or, in this case, Predator drones will be made by other people, and they will be coming this way or to our—we have 800 bases around the world under this empire that we’ve created. So, we’re very vulnerable. In most of them, we’ve created hatred and a desire for revenge.
Peter Kuznick talking:
And it doesn’t work. That’s the other point, that when we started our drone attacks in Yemen, there were 300 members of al-Qaeda there; now there are 700 or 800 members. It backfires, these policies. We just make people hate us. We refer—the CIA operators who target people in Pakistan refer to them as “bugsplats,” the people who are killed there. To the Pakistanis, those are human beings. To the operators here, they’re bugsplats. That’s the attitude.
Oliver Stone talking:
We have to get some comprehensive peace plan going. We have to join the rest of the world, and we have to be part of the United Nations, not an outlier.
http://www.sho.com/sho/oliver-stones-untold-history-of-the-united-states/home
– source democracynow.org
Oliver Stone, three-time Academy Award-winning director and screenwriter. A Vietnam War veteran, he has made around two dozen acclaimed Hollywood films, including Platoon, Wall Street, Salvador, Born on the Fourth of July, JFK, Nixon, W., South of the Border and Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps. Oliver Stone has now co-written a 10-part Showtime series called Oliver Stone’s Untold History of the United States. The first episode launched Monday night on Showtime. It also features a companion book with a similar name.
Peter Kuznick, professor of history and director of the Nuclear Studies Institute at American University. He is the co-writer on a 10-part Showtime series called Oliver Stone’s Untold History of the United States.