There has been a substantial push lately by some of Hollywood's big names to reeducate Americans on world history. The leftist-dominated television and film industries have taken it upon themselves to promote histories of the United States and its role in the world that portrays it as an evil, occasionally colonial, always destructive force in global relations.
The latest such effort is being undertaken by director Oliver Stone, well known for his loving portrayal of Venezuela's Marxist dictator Hugo Chavez and derisive portrayal of our previous president in "W". Now Stone has set his sights on Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin. He plans to "liberalize" America's thinking regarding two of the 20th century's most murderous dictators by putting them "in context", whatever that means (h/t Hot Air headlines).
"We can't judge people as only bad or good," Stone said at the Television Critics Association's press tour, referring to two dictators who--unless this writer's understanding of history is not sufficiently "liberalized"--are responsible, in Hitler's case, for the extermination of 6 million Jews and 3 million others in killing camps during World War II, and in Stalin's, for the murders of 20 million individuals in Russia and Soviet-occupied Europe.
It seems, Stone's claims notwithstanding, that one is historically justified in classifying these two particular dictators as "bad".
Stone tried to dismiss what he calls "ignorant attacks" on what is likely to be a revisionist history of WWII and the legacies of Stalin and Hitler, while, ironically given his use of the term ignorant, comparing Preisdent Bush to the two European dictators (not the first time he has done so). THR reports,
"Obviously, Rush Limbaugh is not going to like this history and, as usual, we're going to get those kind of ignorant attacks," said Stone, who also also compared the experience of sympathizing with war criminals to making his "W" movie about George W. Bush. "I'm trying to understand somebody I thoroughly despised."...
The project will also show lesser-known positive aspects of American history and unsung heroes. Stone eventually hopes to send "Secret History" to schools as a teaching curriculum.
Stone is not the only leftist trying to peddle an uber-liberal history--via Hollywood--to our nation's schoolchildren. Marxist academic Howard Zinn recently teamed up with Matt Damon, a host of other A-list personalities, and the History Channel to propagate a socialist take on American history--dubbed "A People's History of the United States"--in American schools and universities.
The "People's History" teaches that America was founded as--and remains--a racist, sexist, xenophobic bastion of white aristocrats, who exploited minorities and immigrants for their own gain--you know, that familiar Hollywood refrain.
The book on which the series is based, which shares the same title, unsurprising ignores the countless successes of American capitalism, touts Maoist China as a shining example of a "people's government," and fails to mention in its recap of American history Washington's Farewell Address, Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, or Reagan's speech at the Brandenburg Gate. Nowhere in the book will readers find the names Alexander Graham Bell, Jonas Salk, or he Wright Brothers. The book does include the supposedly important stuff like the My Lai massacre, though it leaves out small details like the Normandy Invasion of June 1944.
Zinn and Stone twist history to fit their own radical political views--the same crime they accuse their opponents of and tout as the reason their works are necessary. Of course Hollywood has been producing this sort of dribble for years. But when such work is considered a history in the, you know, factual sense of the term, and when it is taught to students as such, it must be exposed for the revisionist political nonsense that it is.
