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General Douglas MacArthur wades ashore
Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznik have produced a phenomenally great book of U.S. history, and an accompanying television series premiering on Showtime on Monday. Having just read half the book and having watched an advance copy of the first episode, my conclusion is that the book is dramatically better than the TV show, but that both are at the top of what’s available in their respective genres.
The Untold History of the United States is not people’s history in the sense of telling the stories of popular movements. This is very much top-down history dominated by key figures in power. But it is honest history that tears through myths and presents a reality not expected by most Americans — and backs it up with well-documented facts.
This is a history that focuses on foreign policy, and — at least in the book — begins with World War I. No book can include everything one might have liked to see included, but this one is a terrific sampling of things I’ve wished were told more often and things I never knew before. Some will call it a depressing tale lacking “all the good things the United States has done too.” I call it a refreshingly honest tale aimed at improving our conduct going forward. I also come away with a deep sense of gratitude that — for the moment anyway — our society is still around at all. After considering the steps that certain presidents and scientists have taken to destroy life as we know it, one has to be amazed we’re still here. Truman and Eisenhower figure prominently, and I believe that I have found in these authors a couple of men who might just agree with me that Harry Truman is the worst president we’ve ever seen. They certainly make that case quite powerfully.
The book is excellent on World War I and on the New Deal, as well as on forbidden topics like the Wall Street Putsch of 1934 or the Nye Committee hearings on war profiteering. The section on the dropping of the nuclear bombs on Japan is the best I’ve seen. The history of the Cold War and who started it is invaluable. The authors take on McCarthyism, the Eisenhower presidency, the Mossadeq overthrow, the Guzman overthrow, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and numerous other topics with great skill and insight — and careful research.
The Kennedy assassination, which Stone has famously dramatized on film before, gets a mere two paragraphs. The discussion of the formation of Israel leaves much to be desired, but at least it’s there. The Korean War account is incomplete to say the least, as is the discussion of moves to impeach Truman — for which there were motives the authors don’t touch on. But this is quibbling. I would love for everyone to read this book, and I’ll read the second half on Monday.
The book’s take on World War II is far superior to that of the television show’s first episode. The episodes don’t line up with the chapters, and so — for whatever reason — the TV viewers begin in World War II, not World War I. The book has more useful material than the film and is lacking some material the film ought to have left out too. The authors are very much in favor of U.S. entry into the war and wish it had come earlier. They claim that Pearl Harbor was a surprise and reject claims that it was “abetted” by the U.S. government. But who claims that? Many have well documented that it was expected and in a certain sense desired by the Roosevelt White House. But Stone and Kuznick’s account makes crystal clear Roosevelt’s desire for some such war-beginning incident, and their general account of the war is miles above any taught in any U.S. school I’ve ever seen. (Kuznik teaches at American University, so students might consider enrolling there.)
The TV episode on WWII lacks background and context that the book provides in various chapters. The bulk of it is standard history of supposed forces at work and intentions acted on. The “untold” bits include Truman’s racist murderousness, and a particular focus on the starring role the Soviet Union played in “winning” the war. If Episode I serves to ease viewers into the fact-based reality being presented in “The Untold History,” I’m all for it. I suspect, however, that some of the other episodes that I haven’t yet had time to watch will be far more engaging and exciting, as well as controversial — or because controversial. The episode on the dropping of the nuclear bombs might be the one to start your viewing with. Or, if you really want to take my strongest advice: read the book!
Photo from Marion Doss licensed under Creative Commons
19 Comments
Sounds interesting.
I now look back at a life in front of the tube and recognize it as a covert attack on the American mind by the corporate cadre that controls the programming. Most of us were programmed. Of course that’s a conspiracy theory, meaning the elites don’t want us to go there. Strictly verboten.
Here’s an eye-opening book–Treason in America, by Anton Chaitkin
It explains the machinations of the Republic’s traitors within and the covert operations of the Empire to re-colonize us through these traitors operating from Wall Street and the puppet politicians they sponsor to carry out the will of the Oligarchical Empire.
Generally I view American history as a capitalist history in miniature. It reached its apex in the 1950s and 1960s (and to some extent the 1970s) and is currently in decline. The United States was an outgrowth of the European conquest of the world and quickly adopted the principles outlined in the philosophy of John Locke. Its adherents started out with the religions of Protestantism and alcoholism and adopted the existential limitations of money and property in expanding their personal Hells to the world outside. One can see this in the life history of Thomas Jefferson, who went from being the composer of the Declaration of Independence to being a standard-issue slaveholding aristocrat.
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/The-Little-Known-Dark-Side-of-Thomas-Jefferson-169780996.html?c=y&story=fullstory
Property is property y’know. Howard Zinn contributes a lot to this history, but generally it comes from the historical summaries one sees in the writings of Kees van der Pijl. This is a history intimately informed by the humanism of Victor Turner and the activist philosophy of Antonio Gramsci.
I’m not generally in favor of the depiction of American history as a sort of reprise of the Roman history of the last century BCE that you see in the writings of Gore Vidal. I don’t think nostalgia for the era in which America was a “republic” as opposed to an “empire” is a good idea. The idea behind America from the beginning was to wipe out the natives and install an ascendant capitalist class in power.
How do you see Stone’s and Kuznick’s philosophical take on history?
That’s some broad brushes to cover, seems in your opinion the two did good.
Just by your review of the issues they DID cover, I’m greatly impressed.
WW1 = Gallopoli = crazy stupid old school march once more unto the breech.
WW2 = beginning of Catch 22 = MIC.
I think Korea and Vietnam and ’54 Mideast and later MidEast are well understood by many of us, and if not, then folks should KNOW that stuff.
The Brit Empire as it waned post WW2 has been no less of a failure and lesson in life than our own post ww2, or Alexander, The Khans, Assyrians, Roman’s or the USSR. Or early Chinese and Japanese efforts.
They all fail, and will fail, when they neglect the needs of the masses.
I took a Military History course one semester in college (it was part of the ROTC course work but taught by history prof) and he did a good job of informing us of how much the Soviet union did in WWII. Obviously, that gets glossed over in most “USA! Fck YEAh” narratives
Lost me right there.
I was told directly by a Roosevelt White House Employee that EVERYONE in the the top of the Government, especially the White House knew around 3 weeks before that the Japanese were on their way to Pearl.
In addition; it was because we HAD broken their codes much earlier than admitted and preparing would tip them off to that fact, and make the inevitable war harder to fight.
I’m not nearly as cynical as you are about America’s beginnings. On account of because I think it got this right: “We the People.” Of course we know they didn’t live up to their own words in many, many ways. But I think they set their sights on the right guiding star, and I think the ideals still soar.
I’m remembering a column Glenn Greenwald wrote where he said what was so troubling about America now is that it no longer even says those ideals anymore. We used to say them, even if we didn’t live up to them.
So, okay. You can learn as much by what something is not, as by what it is. Sometimes it’s better to learn that way, it sticks, you own it. My sister used to teach kids that way, hers and their friends. Like in the kitchen, handing them a red cup and saying, here’s a yellow cup, and they would hop up and down and laugh and scream it’s not yellow it’s red! Lots of that, they had so much fun. They didn’t just learn the thing, they learned to think for themselves.
My favorite metaphor for what I think of as the promise of America is a sailing ship. It doesn’t make the winds, it sails them, adjusts itself to them, tacks left, tacks right. There’s a kind of humility and skill and grace and joy about it. We are all in this boat together. When ships lost their sails and things got so engined and steeled and top down and straight line course, it got, well, Titanic. Monstrously, tragically stupid.
America now has all the poetry and ideals of a container ship. It doesn’t need winds, it doesn’t need stars, it doesn’t even need people.
That’s not America!
See? I own that. I’m thinking lots of people are owning that now. And it starts all over.
Practically speaking, my own epiphany about where America went wrong, didn’t do what the founding words said or provided, was juries. I think it started long before before Stone and Kuznik do, so I’m sorry that that won’t be the untold story told. Nobody ever amended the Constitution at all, courts alone just redefined and contrained and dumbed down juries over the years, and now hardly anyone even recognizes what’s wrong or missing or possible. It’s like David said about something else in an earlier diary, “it’s almost treasonous to know”. I think juries were supposed to judge the law, constantly; self-governors constantly checking the work of their public servants, what is done in their the people’s name. They were supposed to decide does it float? Now, here, like this, in this case? It’s a test of law in conscience and reality, but more than that it’s how we all stay on the same page, in the same boat, working together. And what we’re working at isn’t fearful punishment, seeking monsters to destroy and finding and burning the witches amongst us, but reasoning, seeing the big picture, and looking from many perspectives many times for our best answers. It doesn’t take a king or a pope, it’s not rocket science, it’s in our grasp, commonly available to all of us; just hold hands, pass hats, and talk together. And keep doing it! That’s how America works, and if it’s not being done like that something’s gone wrong. I think the three branches checking and balancing were supposed to be rock-scissors-paper and that the only losing move was not to play. That’s what I think is possible and intended. Ring, not pyramid. Connection and constant flow.
My surmise of what’s happening to the container ship is that it’s dissolving its rivets. Things fall apart.
Since juries go back at least to the Magna Carta, it presupposes that they’re the people’s check and balance on an unjust monarch, which is what we have and where we’re at now. Hello…?
I put my faith in people. I think America’s founding authority, we the people and self-evidence, is the right one. I think cooperative, helpful beings survive over generations. And I think my 30-year-old Devo card is right; it says: “Biology is destiny.” People spoke America into existence, and when the container ship collapses, people will still be here.
We are where we are. It’s still a test. But it always was.
As important as individual decisions are, I am put off by the “great man” approach to history. It allows a lot of folks who shaped the perceptions and gave the advice to the “great men” to get off the hook of historical responsibility. For example, Paul Nitze is as important to understanding the origins of the Cold war as Truman. And so are the roles of Richard Nixon, Curtis LeMay, and Arthur Vandenberg. And the entire culture that had grown up in the World War II Pentagon.
I suppose that one has to begin with World War I in order to untangle the mythology about the Cold War. The Russian Revolution sent more of a shock wave through the American foreign policy establishment thant did Pearl Harbor. And the Cold War is still part of the architecture of political debates. And the notions of homeland security and moral weakness and internal fifth columns.
If nothing else, despite my low expectations for the impact of this book and TV series, I hope that it dissipates some of the mythology of the Cold War.
The European settlers of this continent could have done a lot more with the culture of the locals here than just use their area names for new states before evicting them into open-air concentration camps. The Iroquois already had democracy. Instead the Euros said, “OK, so this is ‘Alabama.’ Time for ethnic cleansing.” So, for the Founding Fathers, “We The People” really meant “We The White Male Rich Folk.” In that regard, “We The People” means more in this era than it ever did in previous eras of history. Consider in this regard recent advances in gay rights.
The problem with this era is that we just can’t seem to shake the capitalist economic model, and that’s what’s in decline.
Thank you.
Got to disagree with ypu on Harry Truman. Apart from recognizing Israel as an independent state, which secretary of state George Marshall correctly assessed as the worst unforced foreign policy error in American history (from which all tje subsequent Middle East errors other than the overthrow of Mossadegh flowed) he was a pretty damn good President. The only other downside was having to listen to his daughter try to sing.
The late great Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler predicted it. In 1935, he said:
Granted, this is not an example of our government “abetting” the Pearl Harbor attack, or is it? The USA goes around the world strutting its stuff, then gets mad when foreigners strike back. Our military was undoubtedly pleased that Iran tried to shoot down its “unarmed” drone.
So much of one that right before the official end of World War I, the US joined the rest of the European Great Powers in invading Russia in an effort to dislodge the revolutionaries. (Seems the Great Powers, France in particular, had most of the companies and thus most of the corporate and financial wealth in Russia — as contrasted with the homegrown Russian nobles, most of whom were still in the feudal stage where their income came strictly from their land — and so were quite upset when those institutions were nationalized under the Bolsheviks.)
Maybe one out of a thousand Americans knows that America once invaded Russia. Every Russian schoolkid learns this almost immediately.
Respectfully, Jefferson did not go from anything to be a slave holding aristocrat. He was a slaveholder when he wrote he wrote the Declaration of Independence. Worse, he owned his own children and did not free them, even in his will. (I think he may have freed one of his sons, but I am not 100% sure of that. If so, whooptie frickin’ do.)
Jefferson wrote like an egalitarian and lived like a fucker, literally and figuratively.
I realize your Smithsonian source says that Jefferson’s liberal ideals cannot be doubted. I strongly disagree. At best, he was a huge hypocrite. At worst, he was one hell of a cynical so and so.
Either way, he took the virginity of his dead wife’s slave half sister and impregnated her multiple times while owning both her and they children they had together. Then will the lot of them to his white kids.
The adulation in which this nation holds its Founders seem to prompt a lot of whitewash (pun very much intended) attempts as to Jefferson, including falsely attributing to him a quote criticizing corporations and banks that I see all over the internet and that Jefferson never said. http://www.snopes.com/quotes/jefferson/banks.asp
Sorry, I forgot to include the link for the quote in my first post.
Here it is.
http://classroom.monticello.org/kids/resources/profile/263/Middle/Jefferson-and-Slavery/
Color me very skeptical. Anton Chaitkin is a LaRouchian.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anton_Chaitkin
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaRouche_movement
Of course, in itself, that does not mean either that his history is correct or incorrect. I mention that only because people seem to have strong feelings about LaRouche, one way or another.
However, some things are verifiable and don’t seem to add up.
Most people associate the name of Aaron Burr with treason. However, while Aaron Burr was indeed tried for treason, he was also acquitted. No real evidence was put forward. (Newspaper records and court records of the time can be checked to verify all of this.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Burr
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burr_conspiracy
Burr was never charged with his real crime, murder of Alexander Hamilton in an illegal duel in Weehawken, N.J., across the river from what is now the New York skyline. (My aunt lived a few blocks ago, so I have seen the site and the marker.)
That is probably what caused Jefferson to drop Burr from Jefferson’s re-election ticket and, some say, also may have caused Jefferson to charge Burr with treason.
I could find nothing about Gallatin that supports that statement, even a little.
All I could verify was that the man was born in Switzerland to a successful merchant, became an orphan at an early age ran off to America at the age of 19 and died here, after holding many political offices, including Secretary of the Treasury.
Yes, he disagreed with Hamilton’s policies. So did a lot of others.
Yes, but duh. And he forgot to mention the slave trade.
I have no doubt that the First Families of this country made their fortunes through illegal and/or immoral activity. But I would not, by any means, limit the statement to Boston. Sale of slaves, exploitation of slaves, sale of controlled substances, and other unfair and/or illegal activity was the basis of many, many family fortunes.
Here’s the thing: no merchant ever got rich selling well-made legal commodities that they obtained in a moral, ethical way at slightly above cost.
Was this person by any chance a Republican?
e.I am not sure if the Magna Carta (1245 C.E. said anything about juries. I did not have the patience to wade through it.
Juries existed in Ancient Greece, though, and existed in England before the Magna Carta.
I don’t necessarily agree that we give people who owned hundreds of slaves and treated women and people of color as disposable tons of credit for flowery speeches and writing, but I respect your right to that view.
I appreciate your historical input, though it seems to me that the claim of the Smithsonian author as regards the “change” in Jefferson rests significantly upon Jefferson’s repudiation of the promise he made to Kosciuszko. It hardly matters one way or another to me if Jefferson was an oppressor before, during, after, or all three of those as regards the writing of the Declaration of Independence. He fits neatly into a story of the global ascent of the capitalist system. Those other believers in capitalism and “liberty,” the revolutionary French, only freed their slaves in Saint-Domingue (aka Haiti) as the result of an internecine conflict between two overseers and a military general, both of them supporters of the French Revolution. (See, e.g. Jeremy Popkin’s “You Are All Free.” Full freedom was granted in part as a response to the fact that the British and Spanish were threatening to take over the whole colony and had already occupied a portion of it.
Fundamentally, freedoms offered in the capitalist “core” nations of the (historical) expanding capitalist world-system were and are intended largely as a benefit to business interests, and only incidentally benefited “We The People.” Businesses often prefer to operate in dictatorships, but only if their privileges in these dictatorships are on solid ground and cannot be challenged, so business dictatorships have largely been a project of the peripheries of the capitalist world system. Oppression doesn’t hinder profit if the capitalists are the oppressors.