The Untold History
I have enjoyed watching Olver Stone's The Untold History of the United States. A good friend of mine described it to another friend as "taking everything you' ve ever heard about American history, and flipping it on its head." Unfortunately, that is not too much of an exaggeration, though it speaks more to our general ignorance of real history rather than to Stone's well-known agenda. I find his account to be closer to the truth, rather than myth, end of things.
Taki Theodoracopoulos, of all people, has some nice things to say about Stone in a recent column. One would not normally think of the two as natural allies. Taki admits as much.
Oliver Stone’s The Untold History of the United States is a very courageous effort to set the record straight. Stone is an old adversary of mine with whom I’ve recently made my peace. I agree very much on certain parts of his extremely controversial theories about his country. But unlike most other historians, Oliver has paid his dues. He won a Bronze Star in Vietnam as a grunt, whereas he could have gotten deferments, since he was at Harvard and near the top of his class. Stone sees Uncle Sam as a rapacious imperialist. He cites American repression of the Filipino struggle for independence around the turn of the 20th century and the repeated US interventions and covert operations in Latin America, Asia, and the Middle East. He names capitalism as the bogeyman. He also says that the United States, not the Soviet Union, bore the lion’s share of responsibility for perpetuating the Cold War.