Share Facebook

Twitter

Whatsapp

Mail

Whatsapp Untold History of the United States

In an exclusive interview, award-winning director Oliver Stone speaks to Phillip Adams about his ten-part documentary, The Untold History of the United States. Stone, a recipient of both a Purple Heart and an Academy Award, says America's 'necessary' use of atomic weapons on civilians has become the foundational myth justifying decades of brutality.

Can you imagine a world without the atomic bomb, the Cold War, the Vietnam War, the War on Terrorism?

A world where the United States wasn’t positioning itself as a ‘superpower’?

For filmmaker Oliver Stone, many of these key events and outcomes of the ‘American Century’ were not only highly avoidable, but also served hidden purposes—dividing and conquering an otherwise peaceable world order.

And many of them boil down to one horrific decision—Truman's executive order to drop atomic weapons on Japan in 1945.

‘The founding myth for my lifetime is really the atomic bomb,’ Stone told RN’s Late Night Live. ‘[The myth] that the bomb was a “good and necessary thing”.’

‘We have been sold a fairytale masquerading as history, and it's so blinding that it may ultimately undo us.’

There’s little mention of any bombs in any Japanese government cabinet meetings before their surrender. In fact, it was only the invasion of Manchuria by Russian forces which made the Japanese afraid. The bomb was just the pretext for surrender, when they were more worried about Russia.

Stone, and historian Peter Kuznick, have just produced an epic attempt to myth-bust this fairytale—releasing a ten-part documentary series and book called The Untold History of the United States. The project offers an alternative version of the events that drove 20th century geo-politics: one which asks 'What if?' as well as 'Why?'.

According to Stone, who served in Vietnam, earning a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart, the unthinking American imperialism that grew out of WWII has led us all the way from Vietnam into Afghanistan. None of this, he says, would have been possible without the power vested in the United States through possession of the atomic bomb.

Stone believes the decision by President Truman to drop two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki inured the American public to horrific levels of civilian casualties in war, and ultimately paved the way for decades of brutal foreign policy.

In particular, the myth that the two atomic bombs were essential to America’s triumph during World War II, a version of events Stone and Kuznick hotly dispute, laid the foundation for the US to take ‘on the rest of the whole world’.

‘Without the bomb, we [America] couldn’t act like this,’ he says. ‘It’s not the character of Dwight Eisenhower, or the character of Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, or Ronald Reagan. What it is is the bomb. It’s the fact that we have it, we are the indisputable nation, because we have proved that we’re willing to blow up anything, to go that final mile, and we’ve maintained military full-spectrum dominance of the world.’

‘If we can get away with this behaviour in Iraq—and no one in our country has any sense of shame or guilt or apology about it, in the same way we have no shame or guilt or apology about Vietnam—it’s only because of the bomb.’

‘Might makes right, and at the end of the day you get very arrogant when you have might on your side.’

Stone and Kuznick's documentary series begins in the early part of the 20th century, when magazine magnate Henry Luce, head of the Time-Life empire, first coined the term the ‘American century’, predicting that America would dominate the world in every way. But there was an opposing voice who countered Luce, the largely forgotten vice-president of the United States from 1941–1945, Henry Wallace. Wallace thought the 20th century should be the ‘Century of the Common Man’, and he called for a worldwide people’s revolution ending colonialism, ending imperialism, and ending the economic exploitation practised in the tradition of the French, Russian and British empires.

Kuznick, a professor of history at the American University in Washington DC, says that ‘Henry Wallace’s worldview was radical, progressive and he spoke out for the underdog everywhere.’ Wallace denounced America’s fascists, describing them, as ‘those people who think that Wall Street comes first and their nation second.'

But Wallace didn’t enjoy universal popularity. In 1944, and with President Franklin Roosevelt’s health failing, conservative Democrats moved to get Wallace off the ticket. Kuznick says ‘they staged what they themselves called a coup at the time,’ ousting Wallace at the 1944 Democratic Convention in Chicago.

Share Facebook

Twitter

Whatsapp

Mail

Whatsapp Oliver Stone

In spite of Wallace’s public popularity, and the Gallup poll which showed 65 per cent of potential voters wanted Wallace back on the ticket as vice-president, (only two per cent wanted Harry Truman), the unpopular Truman was nevertheless given the candidacy. Kuznick describes Truman as, ‘basically a hack from a political machine in Kansas City’. When Franklin Roosevelt died, catapulting Truman to the presidency on April 12, 1945, Truman admitted to many he wasn't ‘big enough’ or ‘smart enough’ to take on the job, Kuznick says.

But Truman was stuck with it and America was stuck with Truman.

Stone and Kuznick argue that had Henry Wallace become president instead of Truman, there would have been no atomic bombing of Japan in 1945. And Kuznick says the two bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki meant that the Cold War took a much more ‘virulent form’ than it otherwise might have.

Indeed, had not the use of atomic weapons in Japan sparked worldwide paranoia about mutually assured nuclear annihilation, the Cold War as we know it may never have happened, Kuznick says. But as Clark Clifford, then President Truman’s White House counsel, wrote to Truman in 1947: ‘There is considerable political advantage to the Administration in its battle with the Kremlin...In times of crisis, the American citizen tends to back up his President.’

President Truman argued in 1945 and subsequently that using the atomic bomb to target civilian populations was preferable to a land and air war which would have resulted in tens of thousands of American deaths.

But many US generals, including Douglas MacArthur and General Leslie Groves, in charge of the Manhattan Project, believed the invasion of Japan was militarily unnecessary. General Dwight Eisenhower admitted to being very depressed when he learned America was going to drop the atomic bomb because the Japanese were already defeated and he didn’t want America to be the first to use such a terrible weapon. It was Eisenhower who later called for the international control of atomic weapons.

Stone said that the dropping of atomic bombs on Japan did not make the Japanese consider surrender, nor did America’s continued threats to kill their god, the emperor of Japan. ‘There’s little mention of any bombs in any Japanese government cabinet meetings before their surrender,’ Stone says. ‘In fact, it was only the invasion of Manchuria by Russian forces which made the Japanese afraid. The bomb was just the pretext for surrender, when they were more worried about Russia.’

Stone believes that for all the hundreds of thousands of soldiers, airmen and civilians killed in Europe during World War II, the bombing of Japanese cities was ‘more intense, and more obscene’. Besides dropping the atomic bombs, the United States firebombed 100 Japanese cities with incendiary bombs, which carried napalm and white phosphorus, and the impact on these mostly paper cities, made of bamboo and wood, was ‘catastrophic’.

From the end of WWII, the American military establishment and arms industry grew like Topsy, particularly after Dwight Eisenhower took over from Truman in the early 50s, Stone says. Nevertheless, on leaving the office of president in 1962, Eisenhower acknowledged the need for military development, but at the same time sent a warning that subsequent governments and the American people must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence and power by the military industrial complex. Indeed, in his farewell address as president, televised nationally, Eisenhower tried to warn the American public that ‘the potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.’

Kuznick notes that in spite of this warning to others, the military industrial complex grew to immense proportions under Eisenhower’s watch. He says Eisenhower was ‘initially quite progressive, but by the time he becomes president and takes office in 1953, he’s become like many Americans, much more of a hardline Cold War warrior. And it’s under an Eisenhower presidency that the military industrial complex really takes shape. When Eisenhower took office, the United States had approximately 1,000 nuclear weapons. By the time he leaves office [in 1961] we’ve got 23,000 nuclear weapons, and by the time his budgeting cycle is finished we’ve got 30,000 nuclear weapons.’

Since Truman and Eisenhower, the constant threat of nuclear warfare has defined global relations, Kuznick says. He thinks that what’s needed is ‘a new kind of international regime where power is actually shared in order to get through this tough transition, because as a species, we’ve got serious problems confronting us. You look at the global warming crisis, that’s very, very serious.’

Telling the untold story of the United States Listen to Phillip Adams's exclusive interview with Academy award winning director Oliver Stone.

Is there hope for change under the Obama administration?

Kuznick and Stone do believe that there is still time in Obama’s presidency to start ramping down US imperialism and looking at more collaborative approaches to global governance. But Stone is also suspicious of Obama.

‘Although Obama talks beautifully, he’s the wolf in sheep’s clothing,’ Stone says. ‘And he is as hard-ball as it comes. Our space weaponry [has] full-spectrum dominance. We have more weaponry in space now and it's going to increase. By 2025 we’re going to be really in control of cyberspace.’

‘It will be like Stars Wars.’

This interview was originally published on 1/7/13. Find out more at Late Night Live.

