Titus Pullo

Showtime : Oliver Stone's Untold History of the United States : Home

is anyone watching this on ShowTime? Good stuff. Lots of rare footage and testimony. And a fresh reminder that Russia bore the vast brunt of winning WWII. That alone will piss off little McCarthyists everywhere.

But, holy **** did we do some horrible, horrible things around the world after WWII. I mean, I knew most of the individual atrocities, but Stone and Kuznik do a great job with pacing and connecting dots. I'm confident LeMay, Hoover and Dulles all have a special place in Hell to this day.

I love our leaders' rapacious pattern of paranoia in Central and South America, where we overreact for the sake of big business. Usually goes like this: coroporation A loses a tiny bit of profit margin for the sake of a living wage for natives in that country, the CIA gets involved, murders/subverts some democratically elected head of state, leftists revolt and are crushed, business returns to normal, the poor suffer anew all over again. Rinse, repeat.

The series also does justice to the legacy of the great Henry Wallace, driven out by his own party and marginalized as "too soft" after FDR's death. Imagining a world led by Wallace instead of Truman after Spring 1945 is palpable. ... also Truman comes close to matching the arrogant idiocy of George W. Bush - wrong man, wrong time.

Anyhow, the final episode is Monday, where they'll finally cover 9/11 and the great Iraq lie. Looking forward to it.


Stone and Kuznick inverviewed on DemocracyNow about the series:
Oliver Stone on the Untold U.S. History from Atomic Age, Vietnam to Obama's Drone War 1 of 2 - YouTube

DarrylS

Just finished season 1 & 2 of "Homeland", not as good as "24".

Will have to check it out..

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"Being the best doesn't mean you always win. It just means you win more than anyone else".. tweet from Kurt Warner to Tom Brady.

OMGWTFJUDD

Looking forward to seeing it in Oz.

Drewski

Titus - What is the context for for the bolded above?

Number of casualties, money spent etc etc etc?

EDIT: I should note that I am an avid WW2 buff and from a casualty standpoint (both military and civilian) it is a fact that the SU had far higher numbers of causalities than the rest of the Allies. I just didn't know if that was the angle Stone was going for/at.

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Disclaimer:There has been no claim of expertness with this post.

IllegalContact

everyone who made deals with the nazis deserved higher casualties.

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“ I think good coaches will coach with the personnel they have, and if you only have one (good) linebacker, you’re not going to play a 3–4. ”
—Hank Bullough, who installed one of the first 3–4 defenses with the New England Patriots.

Drewski

I suppose....

My post wasn't so much about deserving or not deserving, just acknowledging the fact that the Soviet Union had something in the order of 25 times more casualties than the other big 2 (UK/US) combined (military and civilian).

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Disclaimer:There has been no claim of expertness with this post.

IllegalContact

but not as many as the chinese

what's the point? the war was not carried out in north america......of course there will be fewer casualties

also, stalin killed more of his own in his purges than american lives were lost in WW2 before WW2 even started

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“ I think good coaches will coach with the personnel they have, and if you only have one (good) linebacker, you’re not going to play a 3–4. ”
—Hank Bullough, who installed one of the first 3–4 defenses with the New England Patriots.

Drewski

The Chinese lost somewhere around 20M in WW2, while the Soviet Union lost from 23-25M based on readily available information on the net.

How and who killed who (Stalin) wasn't the point I was making.

I think the point from the OP as well as my followup points was if you ask many Americans about WW2, their facts would be mainly based on what is taught in our schools, which is a very American centric POV, which can ignore many of the historical facts.

America's post war hatred of the big red bear lead our history writers to ignore much of the reality of that period in time (not unique to that time btw, history is always told from the POV of the writer; omissions and changes exist through our species existence).

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Disclaimer:There has been no claim of expertness with this post.

Titus Pullo

That the Soviets faced something like 5-6 times as many Nazi divisions, and the full brunt of the Nazi war machine's Blitzkreig, and threw it back. That the Soviets denied the Nazis the oil-rich Caucuses.

It's pretty clear to me that England would have eventually fallen if Hitler didn't turn his attention east. And we'd have had no where to launch an invasion, but from maybe Africa.

It's interesting that a poster here suggests Russia got what it deserved for "making deals" with Nazis. Perhaps he forgets countless U.S. corporations that did the very same.

Drewski

True. I have read in one of my many books on the subject that 3 out of every 4 Nazi soldiers fought on the Eastern Front; outside of the Luftwaffe, which was busy dealing with the Mighty 8th (amongst others).

Not to mention the Russians faced sieges (and all the bad things that come with them) at some of their largest cities (Stalingrad for one).

The Russians did deny much of the oil but not all. Romania and Yugoslavia come to mind (although much of the refineries there were synthetics.

I would agree. England was our only offensive point of origin for raids from basically 2/42 until the Allies beat the Germans back in Italy and North Africa.

Wasn't Ford one of them? I recall reading that Ford assiting the Germans in building war materials (at least in the run up to US involvement post Pearl Harbor).

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Disclaimer:There has been no claim of expertness with this post.