I have sat through the first three episodes of Oliver Stone’s The Secret History of the United States and am quite disappointed.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1494191/
The spark of Stone’s youthful talents in storytelling Hollywood Style has been sequestered into a malaise of middle age non-focus and boring self-opinionated fluff.
Not to say that interested students in American History domestic and foreign should not watch this series which is interesting in itself, if you already know a lot of history, but as a sole basis of knowledge, it lacks a lot and is rather sloppy IMO in its unfinished editing phase.
The Secret History adds maybe ten to fifteen percent of content to the general body of knowledge but most of what is discussed is already there in the history books one way or the other. As another or alternate opinion as a historian, Stone, like his movies deserves much respect.
I agree with one critic that Stone’s narration is slow, boring and puts you to sleep. It was no doubt done as budgetary gap kind of thing.
What I learned in a more definitive manner about American History is that the hard edge of economics shapes our history as does any Fourth of July picnic myths retelling that history over a communal marshmallow roasting at the twilight fire pit.
That Hitler was put in place by bankers in Germany as much as by many bankers in New York I was aware of but now somebody else in a more prominent role in the American public sphere agrees and speaks such a thought.
That the Russian People won World War Two with their blood and brute force born of sheer numbers of lives lost. That the Soviet Government merely armed their own people to win that tragic blood fest.
That Churchill was a real pussy when it came to having British involvement in a real land war with Hitler on the European mainland. That Churchill was a warrior in his own mind like the original Lord Churchill of three hundred years ago. But in retrospect I now see him as merely a pencil pushing clerk of the Brit Banker’s Global Slave Empire, that he in fact was.
That FDR might have set us up for a fall by dying in the beginning of his fourth term in office. But it was a personal delusion that he could live forever or that his vision for a post WWII world was probably more impossible to achieve than Woodrow Wilson’s failed vision.
That the Industrial Complex with it Bankers and Generals was the stuff that shaped the post WWII world more so than any textbook vision.
Stone somehow pretends that Stalin was a good domestic dictator and that a little better polite handling of that Russian peasant would have prevented the Korean War and by domino effect the Vietnam War, which Stone fought in. That is a true cloud of Oliver Stone fantasy and marijuana smoke.
That Stone’s Messiah in all this politics and real progress of the human race is Henry Wallace, FDR’s second Vice President who spoke a soft cloth coated Socialist rhetoric, who could have prevented the Cold War and the dropping of the two Atomic Bombs on Japan, stretches it a lot.
That Stone hates Truman and trashes him on an implied sexually confused level to make his manufactured Wallace Messiah more real and or palatable.
Truth is that Truman was a learning curve following FDR's death and Harry didn’t have a clue what FDR had in his mind for a post WWII world.
The beast, the bureaucracy and the military/banker complex went forward on its own and from its maker FDR, pretty much the way it was designed to function, with or without him.
That Truman for all his lack of polish was a prissy kind of guy; he loved you or hated you kind of guy. The pettiness and prissiness got lost along with that perception in his thick Missouri Horse Shit accent.
That a Henry Wallace may have had a National American Healthcare System in place by 1950 in America but he would not have desegregated the military like Harry S Truman did, which in turn I think was a catalyst to the whole Civil Rights movement.
That the real tragedy of the extra information Stone supplies or blandly resurrects into common view is that the Japanese surrendered not because of the nuclear bombing of two of its cities but surrendered to the Americans rather than have the Russian invade their mainland as they in fact were ready to do.
That the endgame of military toy games in the U.S., made and used the atomic bombs against a background of indifference of a distant and out of touch Japanese hierarchy.
A good question never asked by Stone is would FDR have used atomic weapons on Germany if they had been ready in place to use and to end that war?
The true tragedy is that nobody in power in the U.S. or Japan cared about the lost Japanese people of Hiroshima / Nagasaki and or their humanity that some or the rest of us care about now of those trapped tragic pawns, these many decades later. That says something significant about our own human evolution as reaction to the events Stone merely frames in his personal art gallery.
Better luck Olly on your next artistic endeavor whatever, puff, puff, it may be.
