HaHA Oliver STONE dropped the bomb on BROKAW on Morning Scabs [View all]

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It might have been a re-run (I don't doze on it much anymore), but he and his co-writer/history professor Peter KUZNICK said - with BROKAW *not* present - that their Showtime chapter on WW II debunks the mythology of "The Greatest Generation" (ka-BOOM!1) and "Band of Brothers" by showing that the Soviets incurred 27M dead compared to 300K U.S. and that CHURCHILL had said the Soviets absorbed the guts of the Nazi war machine. They said their book/series complements Howard ZINN's social/domestic history with the focus on external events.

Only BARNICLE, HEILEMANN, and HALPERIN were present of the regulars, with some new dude sort of taking the Mika/Scabs seat. Scabs would have EXPLODED NUCLEARLY, so to speak, and BROKAW, whom I've always suspected cashed in royally by pandering with "The Greatest Generation" francise, might have lunged across the table.

For the record, STONE also said OBAMA has not received enough criticism from the Left on the continuation and expansion of Shrub war policies, that everybody jumped on Shrub for violating Constitutional civil liberties but not so much on OBAMA for killer drones, personally reviewing lists of who to kill, "which is much worse."

The review below is more hostile to the t.v. series, but there are more positive ones to be found.



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http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/tv/showtracker/la-et-st-untold-history-review20121112,0,4744947.story

[font size=5]Review: American history, as Oliver Stone sees it[/font]

The filmmaker offers an alternative mythology that relies far more on broad-stroke storytelling than rigorous analysis. Still, there's some value in this Showtime miniseries.

By Mary McNamara, Los Angeles Times Television Critic
November 12, 2012

.... But the story of how the United States' actions, at home or abroad, have not always been noble or smart or superior to those of other nations is not quite as untold as Stone believes. That, for example, it was the Soviet army rather than the Americans that turned the tide of World War II has been dealt with in several fairly recent documentaries. That President Harry S. Truman's decision to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima had as much if not more to do with establishing America's dominance in the postwar politics than ending the war with Japan is something that activists, politicians and historians have discussed virtually from the moment he made it. ....

Which is not to say that there isn't value in the series. History demands constant reevaluation and certainly it is important to be reminded that the actions of our government can be tragically flawed. There are wonderful pieces of footage here and vivid glimpses of behind-the-scenes politicking, particularly regarding Franklin Delano Roosevelt's second vice president, Henry Wallace, a progressive liberal Roosevelt fought to get on the ticket, only to have him replaced by conservative forces during his fourth and final term by Truman. In early episodes, Wallace returns to Stone's narrative again and again as a lost hope for America, a man who might have saved us from the sins of the atomic age.

Not every historian sees Wallace as quite the tragic hero Stone considers him, but the narrative of "The Untold History" is too often just as one-note as the versions Stone seeks to replace. Indeed, the inclusion, at several points, of clips from Capra's "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" is as telling as it is narratively jarring. Stone presents his case with little recognition of the social, political and psychological complexities that dominate much of human development, turning it, intentionally or not, into an alternative mythology that relies far more on broad-stroke storytelling than rigorous analysis.

And isn't that what he was angry about in the first place?

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