Snark

Oliver Stone is to History what Roman Polanski is to Children.

  1. joey:

    Well if it makes the sheep question their world that is a good thing,  accurate or not perhaps they will try to find out there history themselves.  As an Irish man that has lived in New York on and or for the last 15 years, the ignorance of the average American about the world, and there history in general is shocking.  
    After reading the wages of distruction I was disturbed at the portrayal of Hitlers as a cold and Calculating Leader,  the table gnawing mad man was much more palatable.  American love their fictions (and endless Nazi porn there publishing industry seems to produce).
    I’ve seen the history channel 🙁 that is far more pernicious, people actually watch that.

  2. zen:

    hi joey,

    .
    I’ve watched JFK and Nixon and if Stone just said " I make entertaining films" I’d have no problem with him just as ppl can watch HBO’s Rome or The Last Emperor or other movies with historical characters. I enjoyed JFK and parts of Nixon even though I did not take it seriously. I part company with Stone when he presents his Chomsky on a bad acid trip interpretations as "historical".
    .
    Agree with you though that there is a considerable all-Nazi, all the time feel to the history channel at times. 😉  Their audience demographic may have something to do with that. Also agree on the abombinable state of historical knowledge of the average American
  3. democratic core:

    In summer camp, there used to be a late-night story told to scare little kids about a girl who always wore a scarf.  One day, her boyfriend asked her why she always the scarf, so she took it off and to her boyfriend’s horror, her head fell off.  Do you think this is the case with Oliver Stone?

  4. Seerov:

    I like Hollywood’s portrayal of the JFK murders:  Homosexual-CIA-Nazis in the military industrial complex.  One thing is for sure, if there was/is a conspiracy against JFK, it wasn’t the people who get presented to us in popular entertainment and academia. 

  5. zen:

    Here’s a story.
    .
    I once bent my stern ethics as a historian and invited a JFK assassination expert who argued a conspiracy ( albeit a small, realistic one) to lecture to my students as he had passed muster with the Navy ( Naval War College I  think) and a few other very credible entities. The guy did have USG docs that showed a very nasty individual, a French Foreign Legion paratrooper and sniper, who had taken part in the Algerian coup against DeGaulle and became a member of the Marseilles mafia, was in Dallas the day JFK was assasinated and in Los Angeles when Sirhan Sirhan shot RFK.
    .
    Not sure what that proved but at least it was documented.

  6. YT:

    Zen,
    .
    Re: "considerable all-Nazi, all the time feel to the history channel"
    .
    Least it ain’t showin’ zombies & vampires.