Oliver Stone (was:Pauper and Sweatshop Fallacies)

[Joseph Tracy]

I think Laura is making some pretty potent points. In more recent and more morally bankrupt wars like Vietnam and Iraq the same arguments of defending our country are used and slide by largely on the arguments of  and association with our most justifiable war.  But  I read the geneva accords  or consider the way that the killing of civilians was judged at Nuremberg and for me  Hiroshima and Nagasaki appear to be  collective punishment  and enormous  war crimes which have been found by many historians to be unnecessary.

As far as Stalin I haven't gotten the Stone series because he said enough in some interviews I heard to make me fairly sure i would find his take on Stalin something I'd rather not listen to. The fact that Stalin took the lead in the war with Hitler says nothing meaningful about his character and in no way justifies his betrayal of socialism or his  betrayal of Russia in a campaign of  police state totalitarianism and mass murder . His example should really be a warning to the US because fighting back against an empire intent on devouring you is more an act of self preservation than heroism or devotion to high ideals and it is the larger history and career that reveals what a person or nation is about. Neither the US nor Russia looks nearly as good without Adolf.

I think every possibility to learn from history is undermined when you treat it as a mirror of your heroic collective identity.  


On Jan 15, 2013, at 1:27 PM, kelber at mindspring.com wrote:


> It's funny how Hiroshima is always evaluated in terms of the lives of American servicemen. The real currency-unit of war is the child-life.  How many American children's lives were saved by the decision to incinerate Japanese children (or napalm Vietnamese children, or drone Pakistani and Afghan children)?   I think it's very easy to say nay to this issue, Rich.  You shout Stone down because he even questions the orthodoxy.  Show me all the public venues, the Spielberg movies, the congressional panels, where pre-Hiroshima Japanese diplomatic maneuverings have been parsed and analyzed. Why would you be opposed to anyone - ANYONE!- asking tough questions about this decision.  Not only were children incinerated, but the survivors gave birth to deformed children.  Survivors and their descendants are shunned to this day as genetic mutants. This idea of laying waste to future generations of "the enemy," whether with nuclear fallout or Agent Orange, was born with the dropping of the bomb.  What a great concept:  We (no, fuck it, They) can kill unseen people with the touch of a button.  "We had to do it to save American lives," has all the moral authority of the German "we didn't know about the concentration camps," or Holocaust denials, or the idea of the "smart bomb that only kills 'bad' guys."  It's the same mentality that allows the Bushes and Obama to pretend that only high-placed al-Qaeda terrorists are killed by the drones.
> 
> Her's the explanation Truman gave for dropping the bomb (from http://www.doug-long.com/truman.htm):
> 
> "The Japanese began the war from the air at Pearl Harbor. They have been repaid many fold." 
> ("Public Papers of the Presidents: Harry S Truman, 1945", pg. 197).
> 
> On Aug. 9, after Nagasaki was a-bombed, Truman made another public statement on why the atomic bombs were used:
> 
> "Having found the bomb we have used it. We have used it against those who attacked us without warning at Pearl Harbor, against those who have starved and beaten and executed American prisoners of war, against those who have abandoned all pretense of obeying international laws of warfare. We have used it in order to shorten the agony of war, in order to save the lives of thousands and thousands of young Americans." 
> ("Public Papers of the Presidents: Harry S Truman, 1945", pg. 212).
> 
> The "thousands and thousands" he refers to has been escalated to millions by the average, clueless American.  But revenge for Pearl Harbor was the big excuse back then.
> 
> Here's a longer article that brings up the arguments that Stone makes:
> 
> http://www.doug-long.com/index.htm
> 
> I grew up in an anti-war household.  My mother had stacks of a booklet called Let There Be a World, with gruesome photographs of Hiroshima victims, alive and dead, and deformed babies that were born later.  She didn't shelter us from these pictures.  It's surprising, really, how few people have seen these pictures.  Generally, the stock image is the mushroom cloud.
> 
> Here are some of the more graphic pictures (though nowhere as gruesome as the ones in my mother's long-forgotten booklet), from a Japanese anti-war site:
> 
> http://www.gensuikin.org/english/photo.html  
> 
> Here's the Life magazine footage of Hiroshima, in the aftermath.  Gee, what's missing from these pictures?
> 
> http://life.time.com/history/hiroshima-and-nagasaki-photos-from-the-ruins/?iid=lb-gal-viewagn#1
> 
> Here's one of the few documentaries (BBC) available about what happened on the ground at Hiroshima. 
> 
> http://pro.imdb.com/title/tt0475296/ 
> 
> Where are the mainstream American documentaries?  Not just a quick image of the cloud and one burn victim, but a whole movie about what happened to the victims?  America-the-free has yet to produce it. 
> 
> Laura
> 
> 
> 
> 
> -----Original Message-----
>> From: rich <richard.romeo at gmail.com>
>> Sent: Jan 15, 2013 9:29 AM
>> To: kelber <kelber at mindspring.com>
>> Cc: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
>> Subject: Re: Oliver Stone (was:Pauper and Sweatshop Fallacies)
>> 
>> there's plenty enough legitimate exposes to go around without the
>> moronic Oliver Stone getting involved. what sort've moral blindness
>> does it take to praise Joseph Stalin. wtf
>> 
>> Dropping the A bomb--not an easy issue to say yea or nay--it's been
>> debated again and again. think you have to consider the mood at the
>> time--two bloody battles on Iwo Jima and Okinawa. am i glad we dropped
>> it. no. who would be. but real life is complicated. and yeah, it
>> would've been my dad and uncles on the front line if the war was
>> extended. has japan ever questioned officially its many war crimes in
>> China and southeast asia? no. maybe stone mentioned it. but he was
>> never interested in nuance.
>> 
>> rich
>> 
>> On Mon, Jan 14, 2013 at 4:53 PM, Keith Davis <kbob42 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Thanks for this well-balanced critique of this interesting show.
>>> 
>>> 
>>> On Mon, Jan 14, 2013 at 4:40 PM, <kelber at mindspring.com> wrote:
>>>> 
>>>> Alice said:
>>>> 
>>>> [insert your choice here, but please no Howard Zinn or Oliver
>>>> Stone ;-)]?
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> Oh, Alice, Alice, you brought it upon yourself!  I was looking for some
>>>> gratuitous opening to bring up Oliver Stone's new series:The Untold History
>>>> of the United States, and you supplied it.  Now before you start beating on
>>>> me, I'll say that it's a pretty flawed documentary.  One device he uses
>>>> that's both dishonest and annoying is to have actors recite quotes from
>>>> various personages, making it seem as if we're listening to a historic
>>>> oration, rather than a reenacted reading of someone else's written or spoken
>>>> words.  He's weak on attributing sources, uses way too much Hollywood
>>>> footage to make rhetorical points (as opposed to using it to show the
>>>> mentality of the particular time), and gets over-zealous in praising various
>>>> personages (as various as Henry Wallace and Stalin), to the point where the
>>>> so-called documentary devolves to overt propaganda of Fox-level intensity.
>>>> The worst part of this is that, in doing so, he drives away mainstream
>>>> viewers who could actually be enlightened by some of the things he has to
>>>> say.
>>>> 
>>>> But he still makes some good points, and asks questions that are rarely if
>>>> ever asked on such a mainstream venue as Showtime.  In last week's episode,
>>>> by way of discussing Bushes senior and junior, he brought up the shameful
>>>> history of Prescott Bush and other American industrialists who supported the
>>>> Nazi regime (something that we discuss all the time here, by way of GR).
>>>> 
>>>> I particularly liked the episode that covered Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
>>>> wherein he tackled the standard orthodoxy:  By dropping the bomb, we saved x
>>>> number of lives.  This passionately defended point has been the endless
>>>> fodder for Thanksgiving dinner fights with in-laws, etc., with countless
>>>> (always male)defenders shrieking variations of (naively confident that no
>>>> one will make the obvious, hostile rejoinder): "Hey my [father, grandfather]
>>>> was stationed in the Pacific.  If we hadn't dropped the bomb [incinerated
>>>> small children], he would have had to invade Japan, and I would never have
>>>> been born!"
>>>> 
>>>> The Stone episode brings up some convincing evidence that Japan, afraid of
>>>> an impending invasion by the Soviet army, was ready to capitulate, but
>>>> Truman stalled any negotiations, and convinced the Soviets not to invade, so
>>>> the "tests" could be run.  Stone also provides a nice montage showing how
>>>> the variable x in "we saved x number of lives" increased steadily over time.
>>>> I suspect there are plenty on this list who are devoted to the
>>>> bomb-saved-lives orthodoxy.  I'm glad Stone questions it, if only on
>>>> subscriber cable TV.
>>>> 
>>>> Laura
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> -----Original Message-----
>>>>> From: alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com>
>>>>> Sent: Jan 14, 2013 5:49 AM
>>>>> To: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
>>>>> Subject: Re: Pauper and Sweatshop Fallacies
>>>>> 
>>>>> Why would I deny it? Why would anyone who knows a bit of history, who
>>>>> reads the newspapers, who has read One Hundred Years of Solitude,
>>>>> M&D...any decent narrative about colonialism, orientalism, a but of
>>>>> Said or [insert your choice here, but please no Howard Zinn or Oliver
>>>>> Stone ;-)]?
>>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> --
>>> www.innergroovemusic.com
>