On History: Tariq Ali and Oliver Stone in Conversation
Page 1
ON HISTORY
ON HISTORY
Oliver Stone
and
Tariq Ali
in Conversation
Haymarket Books
Chicago, Illinois
© 2011 Tariq Ali and Oliver Stone
First published in 2011 by
Haymarket Books
P.O. Box 180165
Chicago, IL 60618
773-583-7884
info@haymarketbooks.org
www.haymarketbooks.org
Trade distribution:
In the US, Consortium Book Sales and Distribution, www.cbsd.com
In the UK, Turnaround Publisher Services, www.turnaround-uk.com
In Canada, Publishers Group Canada, www.pgcbooks.ca
In Australia, Palgrave Macmillan, www.palgravemacmillan.com.au
All other countries, Publishers Group Worldwide, www.pgw.com
ISBN: 978-1-60846-149-3
Cover design by Amy Balkin.
This book was published with the generous support of Lannan Foundation and the Wallace Global Fund.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication data is available.
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Contents
Preface
Chapter 1: From the Russian Revolution to the Second World War
Chapter 2: The Post–World War II Order
Chapter 3: The Soviet Union and Its Satellite States
Chapter 4: Pax Americana?
Chapter 5: Blowback
Chapter 6: The Revenge of History
Preface
In early 2009, I received a phone call from Paraguay. It was Oliver Stone. He had been reading Pirates of the Caribbean: Axis of Hope, my collection of essays on the changing politics of Latin America, and asked if I was familiar with his work. I was, especially the political films in which he challenged the fraudulent accounts of the war in Vietnam that had gained currency during the B-movie years of Reagan’s presidency.
Stone had actually fought in that war in the US Infantry, which made it difficult for others to pigeonhole him as a namby-pamby pacifist. Many of his detractors had avoided the draft and were now making up for it by proclaiming that the war could have been won, had the politicians not betrayed the generals. This enraged Stone, who detested the simplistic recipes now on offer in every aspect of American domestic and external politics. In the original Wall Street (1987), for instance, he had depicted the close links between crime and financialized capitalism that ultimately led to the crash of 2007.
The war in Vietnam played a large part in shaping Stone’s radical take on his own country. One of the film JFK’s most striking scenes, almost ten minutes in length, portrays a talking-heads duo: Jim Garrison (Kevin Costner) and an unidentified military intelligence officer (Donald Sutherland) as they are walking by the Potomac River in Washington, DC, discussing who killed Kennedy. The Sutherland character links the president’s execution to his decision to withdraw US troops from Vietnam some months previously. For me, it is—together with the depiction of French officers calmly justifying torture in Gillo Pontecorvo’s classic Battle of Algiers and the Greek far-right plotting to kill the leftwing deputy Lambrakis in Costa-Gavras’s Z—one of the three finest scenes in political cinema.
A steady flow of jeremiads from critics on the left and the right denounced this particular scene in Stone’s JFK as pure fantasy. Later research, however, including the recently published biography of one of the Kennedy administration’s leading hawks, McGeorge Bundy, has overwhelmingly vindicated his approach. Kennedy had indeed decided to pull out, largely on the advice of retired General Douglas MacArthur, who told him the war could never be won.
Stone’s refusal to accept establishment “truths” is the most important aspect of his filmography. He may get it wrong, but he always challenges imperial assumptions. That is why he traveled to Paraguay to talk to the new president there—a defrocked bishop, weaned on liberation theology, who had succeeded in electorally toppling the long dictatorship of a single party. Fernando Lugo had become part of the new Bolivarian landscape, one that included Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, Evo Morales in Bolivia, and Rafael Correa in Ecuador, flanked by the Kirchners in Argentina, and defended, until his departure, by Lula in Brazil.
Stone asked whether we could meet to discuss his most ambitious project, a twelve-hour documentary series entitled The Untold History of the United States. A month later, we met up in Los Angeles. He explained why he felt this project was so necessary. There was a shocking lack of information in the country about its own past, he said, let alone the rest of the world. The receding memory of US citizens was not an accident. “For decades now the kids are either being taught rubbish prepackaged as history modules or nothing,” he told me. He regarded this television history as being, in some ways, his most important work. It would present a historical narrative of the United States and how it became an empire. He interviewed me on film for seven hours, with a few breaks for water (both drinking and passing). Some of my books were by his side, heavily underlined. It was a stimulating experience, devoid of melancholy or sentimentality on either side. He had a job to do, and got on with it. The result, with some cosmetic editing, is the book you have before you.
Until then, I had assumed that Stone’s recent tour of South America was for The Untold History, but this turned out not to be the case. Angered by the crude assaults on the new leaders by US television networks, as well as the print media (the New York Times was a serial offender), Stone had decided to offer the much traduced elected politicians a voice. But he and his producers, Robert Wilson and Fernando Sulichin, now felt the film had become too bogged down on US media terrain. They asked me to view a rough cut. It was a well-meaning but confusing effort. It simply did not work. Given the scorn Stone’s enemies were likely to heap on the film, regardless of its quality, it was best to reduce the number of hostages. Could it be rescued, Wilson wanted to know. I suggested that the existing structure be discarded. I also suggested the valuable archive and a few interviews that should be retained and reinserted in a new version.
In the new commentary that they asked me to write, I concentrated on the strengths of the footage Stone had amassed on his whirlwind two-week tour. This film, in sharp contradistinction to the mesmeric Comandante, Stone’s seventy-five-minute filmed interview with Fidel Castro, released in 2003, could be much more playful. The resulting documentary was South of the Border. The initial research and script were constructed by cowriter Mark Weisbrot and was reedited as a political road movie with a straightforward narrative. A radical and legendary Hollywood filmmaker, angered by what he is watching on his television screen, decides to hop on a plane. In moving and simple terms, the documentary states the case for the changes taking place in South America.
It does not set out to be an analytical, distanced, cold-blooded view of leaders desperate to free themselves from the stranglehold of the Big Brother up north. The film is sympathetic to their cause, which is essentially a cry for freedom, the interviews with the seven elected presidents forming its spinal cord. Chávez is given center stage because he was the pioneering leader of the radical social-democratic experiments currently under way in the continent, and his country has large oil reserves. “If the film convinces people that Chávez is a democratically elected president and not the evil dictator depicted in much of the Western media,” Stone said, “we will have achieved our purpose.”
It’s a tall order these days, but nonetheless was worth a try. A typical gringo criticism of the documentary was that, in his voice-over, Stone can’t even pronounce
Chávez’s name (he says Shah-vez, not Chah-vess). Interesting that this barely ruffles a feather in Latin America. A mispronunciation of a name is the least of their problems. I have yet to meet a gringo (friend or enemy) who can pronounce my name properly, but it’s not a reason to regard a person as intellectually impoverished.
There is another view of the film that we encountered from some Latin American academics working in the United States: that it is too simple. Here we plead guilty. It was never intended to be a tract or a debate. Stone knows his country and its citizens and their viewing habits: South of the Border was designed to raise a few questions in their minds. Not that Europe is a great deal better. The hostility to the Bolivarian leaders is pretty universal in the European media, as well, with a few partial exceptions. Strange that a world that bleats on endlessly about democracy has become so hostile to any attempts at economic and political diversity.
Venezuela’s late great novelist Rómulo Gallegos wrote in 1935 of Venezuelan history as “a fierce bull, its eyes covered and ringed through the nose, led to the slaughterhouse by a cunning little donkey.” No longer. What impressed Stone was that the cunning oligarchs of the two-party system had been defeated and that the bull was free. The Untold History of the United States—currently scheduled to be aired in late 2011 or early 2012 by Showtime—will explain at length why the donkeys were given power in the first place.
More than three thousand people, mostly poor and indigenous, attended the film’s premiere in Cochabamba, Bolivia, and cheered their side without restraint. “They knew instinctively who the baddies were,” Stone told me in New York. “Unlike here.” The New York Times assigned a veteran hack from the Reagan era—a staunch supporter of the Contras in Nicaragua—to interview us. Perhaps it was tit-for-tat: they wanted to punish us for the disobliging references to the “paper of record” in the documentary. At times it felt as if we were being questioned by a Cold War spook after a trip to a forbidden country. The result was a predictable hack job.
What next? Over dinner at Stone’s house, with his Korean partner Sun-jung, their intelligent fourteen-year-old daughter (the real inspiration for The Untold History), and his feisty eighty-seven-year-old French mother, Jacqueline Goddet, the director asked jokingly whether there were any strong characters left to consider for a movie. “Lenin or Robespierre?” I inquired hopefully. He turned to his mother, a staunch and devout Gaullist, who couldn’t believe her ears. “Robespierre?” she repeated. “Assassin!” That in itself would never be sufficient reason for Oliver not to embark on such a project. An old sinner can’t be stopped from casting the penultimate stone.
—Tariq Ali
Chapter 1
From the Russian Revolution to the Second World War
Oliver Stone: I’ve always wanted to meet you, and I’m glad to have you here in Los Angeles, and to share this time together. It’s really an honor, thank you.
Tariq Ali: My pleasure.
I’d like to get right into it and ask you about a strong thesis in your book Pirates of the Caribbean, regarding the Russian Revolution. What was its impact on America and what was its impact on the world?
Let us just start with the First World War, which probably was the single most important event of the twentieth century, not recognized as such. We mainly think about the Second World War and Hitler, but it was the First World War that brought about suddenly the death of a number of empires. The Austro-Hungarian Empire collapsed. The Ottoman Empire collapsed. The tsarist empire in Russia collapsed. And on the heels of this arose nationalism, communism, revolutionary movements of different kinds. The Russian Revolution probably would not have happened in that particular way had there not been a First World War, which broke up the old ruling classes, brought an end to the old order. In February 1917, the war is going badly. Russia is in revolution, the tsar has been overthrown. And in February 1917, coincidentally, the leaders of the United States decide that they’re going to enter this war. A total break with isolationism, and feeling that because Europe is changing, and possibly because the changes might threaten them—Bolsheviks are taking over—they have to go in and intervene in this war and sort it out. And suddenly America is aroused. We’ve got to go and fight the Germans, they want to defeat the Germans. And in goes the United States.
So the First World War is the event that drives the United States away from this part of the world in North America and into Europe, and sets it up on the world stage. And that sets the stage for the big confrontations that we saw in the twentieth century. Because the Russian Revolution had a massive impact. It had not simply toppled the monarchy. After all, that had happened in the French Revolution and in the English one before that. That wasn’t new. And the American Revolution had decided to do away with aristocracy and monarchs all together. But it was the hope that came with the Russian Revolution, the feeling that you could change the world for the better, and bring the downtrodden, the wretched of the earth, and put them on a pedestal. That was the aim, that was the hope. And for twenty or thirty years, that hope carried on. It wasn’t until much later that people realized that this hadn’t worked, that the Russian situation had many, many problems of its own. But just the belief that the working-class movement of the world was going to be elevated had a big impact everywhere, including in the United States. Not just on the rulers, not just on the corporations, but on the labor movement.
I think one should never forget that the United States had a very strong tradition of labor militancy. You had the Wobblies, the Industrial Workers of the World, which united all the migrant workers from all over into one big union. The Wobbly Joe Hill used to take the songs of the Salvation Army, and turn them around: “There’ll be pie in the sky when you die.” And all these songs brought to life and unified the labor movement in the United States—people from different parts of Europe who didn’t even speak the same languages. German, English, Norwegian, Swedish, they became one family.
And there was a lot of repression. People rarely talk about it, but there was a lot of repression carried out by the corporations in the United States against the American working class in the 1920s and the 1930s. And I think that that repression played a big part in preventing the emergence, if you like, of a more socialist, more labor party structure in the United States. Politics got stuck at the top. So the Russian Revolution’s impact went very, very deep, and one can’t ignore it.
Would you say the United States went into World War I decisively because of the Russian Revolution, or would it have gone anyway? If Russia had withdrawn from the war, Britain and France perhaps would’ve been overwhelmed by the German military at this point.
Well, I think the combination did it. That the Bolsheviks had raised the demand for land, bread, and peace. They weren’t going to fight in this war. And there’s no doubt that the Germans would have defeated the French.
There was no doubt?
And the British. There’s no doubt that, had the United States not gone in, the Germans would’ve won a tremendous victory. But that on its own wouldn’t necessarily have worried the United States. After all, they could’ve dealt with the Germans as the big European power. But I think they probably felt that they had to intervene to defend present and future US interests in the globe prior to the First World War. The interest of the United States was largely in its own territory, and in South America, which it called its “backyard.”
The United States apparently loaned Britain quite a bit of money for World War I. The bonds totaled several billion dollars, I believe, at the time. These would not have been repaid if Germany had won the war. Would there have been an arrangement reached with Germany?
I think there were ways of reaching arrangements. But the Russian Revolution must have concentrated minds a great deal. Woodrow Wilson, as president of the United States, felt he had to come up with an alternative. And his alternative was national independence, self-determination, but also the Treaty of Versailles. So the Treaty of Versailles was pushed through by Wi
lson, and the punishment of Germany was directly responsible for the rise of fascism. I don’t think there’s any two ways about that. The way the Germans were treated gave rise to a very virulent national movement in Germany, which later became the Third Reich. All of the early propaganda of the Nazis emphasized that Germans had been dealt a rough hand: the German people are being punished, the German nation is being punished, the German race is being punished, and it’s Americans, the Jewish plutocrats in New York, and their friends in Germany who are uniting against us.
This is decisive. If the Treaty of Versailles had been more evenhanded, or let us suppose that the United States had done in Europe after the First World War what it did after the Second World War—that is, to say that we are perfectly prepared to do business with you and to help you recover—who knows what it would’ve been like.
And if the Versailles Treaty was one element in helping the Nazis come to power, the other element was without doubt the fear of Bolshevism. That the decisions made by the top German corporations, and large numbers of the German aristocracy, which is not often recognized to have backed Hitler and have put him in power was because they were fearful that if we don’t go with Hitler there’s going to be a revolution in Germany. Look what they did in Russia and we’re going to be sunk, so better go with this guy who’s going to save us from the Bolsheviks. The effect of the Russian Revolution was a massive rise of the German workers’ movement. The split inside the German labor movement was between a pro-Bolshevik wing, and a more traditional social-democratic wing. And if you look at all the propaganda of the German nationalists and the German fascists, the threat was always presented as a Jewish Bolshevik conspiracy. So the Jews played two roles. They were either plutocrats or they were Bolsheviks. The pamphlets, the literature, was about Germany fighting against the Jewish Bolshevik conspiracy, and that went straight into the Second World War.