Oliver Stone, Peter Kuznick Book Recycles Stalinist Talking Points

• Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick, The Untold History of the United States, Gallery Books, 2012, 750 pages, $30.

RALEIGH — Oliver Stone and co-autor Peter Kuznick explain their approach to The Untold History of the United States in this way: “We don’t focus on many of the things the United States has done right. We are more concerned with focusing a spotlight on what the United States has done wrong.”

The movie director and history professor say they want to illuminate the “darker side of U.S. history.”

From the outset the authors reject American exceptionalism and, as in Stone’s movies, the United States is always the villain. From the Spanish American War through World Wars I and II, the Cold War, Central America, and the Middle East, the authors show the United States in the worst possible light. None of it us “untold” and from start to finish one can hear the barrel being scraped. The prose style runs a heavy fever. For example, “Venezuelan dictator General Juan Vincente Gomez’s brutal and rapacious regime made his country a favorite of American and British oil companies.”

The authors profess to find nuclear weapons troubling, but only in context. By setting off atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the United States, “once again, proved itself unready to provide the kind of leadership a desperate world cried out for.”

Jimmy Carter gets some points as “marvelous ex-president,” but catches heat for making his national security adviser Zbignew Brzezinski, “an obsessed anti-Communist.” The chapter on the Reagan years is subtly subtitled “Death Squads for Democracy.” George H.W. Bush is “among the very worst presidents in U.S. history, if not the absolute worst,” and his son no better. Even Barack Obama does not emerge unscathed.

You get the idea.

Overall, the United States emerges as the flywheel of fascist imperialism, headed by warlike racist buffoons eager to back murderous regimes by any means necessary. The authors never ask a key question: Compared to what is the United States an evil empire? Consider the authors’ treatment of the Soviet Union, Stalin and Communism, America’s major rivals in the past century. Here, in particular, does Untold History stand in need of stool-softener and a polygraph test.

The Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939, which effectively started World War II, was an “unsavory deal” Stalin struck with Hitler because he feared a “German-Polish alliance” to attack the USSR. As noted in the Black Book of Communism and Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands, Stalin’s USSR was a death squad, ruling by terror and murdering countless millions. For all its bulk, Untold History lists only two atrocities by Stalin, the massacre of Polish officers in the Katyn forest and “having the Red Army stop on the banks of the Vistula while the Germans put down the Warsaw uprising.” This is the moral equivalent of Holocaust denial. The authors even include a photo of Russians mourning Stalin, whose death in 1953, some 50 years too late, was a cause for celebration.

Here the Soviet Union gets full credit for winning World War II and afterward was benign, having “no blueprint for postwar Sovietization of Eastern Europe and hop[ing] to maintain friendly and collaborative relations with its wartime allies.” Further, the Soviets “had gone out of their way to guarantee West Berliners’ access to food and coal from the eastern zone or from direct Soviet provisions.” So with the USSR essentially a peaceful regime, the heroic Berlin airlift touted in American schools was unnecessary.

Despite the occupation of half of Europe, the crushing of reform in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, and the invasion of Afghanistan, the “picture of a hostile, expansionist USSR” from CIA director William Casey “didn’t accord with the facts.” The 1983 KAL 007 shootdown even gets a pass: The Soviets “mistakenly took a Korean Air Lines passenger jet for a spy plane.” In the lexicon of neo-communism, the peaceful Soviets make “mistakes” and are evaluated by their aspirations. The militant United States commits crimes and is evaluated on the worst of its record.

In Untold History, American Stalinists get off easy. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, for example, are responsible for giving nuclear weapons to Stalin, the worst mass murderer in history. Here they are only “accused atomic spies.” For the real story see The Rosenberg File, by Ronald Radosh and Joyce Milton.

Stone and Kuznick predictably tout “3,000 brave American volunteers” who “went to Spain to battle the Fascists … the legendary Communist-backed Abraham Lincoln Brigade.” For the real story of this sorry Stalinist militia, see Cecil Eby’s Comrades and Commissars and Between the Bullet and the Lie.

The star of Untold History is former Vice President Henry Wallace, the Progressive Party candidate in 1948, portrayed here as a kind of American Mikhail Gorbachev, an endorser of the book along with Daniel Ellsberg and Bill Maher. The authors tout Wallace’s “Century of the Common Man,” but fail to note that, as one observer put it, Wallace’s Communist backers confused the Common Man with the Comintern (the Communist International, the Soviets’ agency for managing national Communist parties).

The book mentions the Hollywood Ten but does not chart how the Communist Party USA set the tone for politics in the American movie industry. After revelations of Stalin’s crimes, the Soviet Union ceased to be a model for emulation but the anti-American demonology remained, mindless and sulfuric as ever.

As Richard Grenier observed, Hollywood leftists charge that America is bad and capitalism is evil — except for their three-picture deal with MGM, their fat bank accounts, their Malibu mansions, their Mercedes-Benzes and Ferraris. Despite everything in Untold History, even Oliver Stone believes in some form of American exceptionalism.

Lloyd Billingsley is author of Hollywood Party: How Communism Seduced the American Film Industry in the 1930s and 1940s (Prima).