There may be a lot of things wrong with this country, but at least some of us can admit it. Not necessarily what politicians talk about, of course; what the other side is doing is usually always “wrong,” unless it is something everyone can be “patriotic” about, like foreign threats. On the other hand, many people in this country are prone to allow their basest instincts to be their guide, which explains why many people follow someone like Donald Trump—whose personality and “instincts” resemble that of a spoiled child, who like any narcissistic bully views the world only in terms of his personal likes or dislikes regardless of what other people think or the consequences of acting on juvenile impulses.
Now there are those self-styled truth tellers like filmmaker Oliver Stone who want to tell the “whole” truth and nothing but the truth about this country. Stone attempted to do this in his 12-part documentary Untold History of the United State, which took few prisoners (JFK excepted) concerning the U.S.’ foreign adventures. Stone most recently worked on a documentary that will “expose” this country unfounded fears of nuclear power, which he regards as “clean” energy—or at least cleaner than fossil fuels—and suggests that a negative campaign against it to con the public was orchestrated by an uninformed media, the greedy fossil fuel industry and its political supporters.
Stone also has received some attention for his willingness to gather the views of people the U.S. government has demonized over the years, like Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro; Stone is not exactly a “liberal” by any stretch, but he seems to think that “socialists” have a right to be what they are when the “alternative” is the right-wing murder regimes that the U.S. has supported in the past, particularly in Latin America.
That is all well and good, but Stone apparently has gone off the deep end in regard to his good friend Vladimir Putin, who Stone apparently feels he needs to be “gentle” with merely because Putin showed him his “good” side and probably lied a lot to him in a few interviews that Putin consented to a few years ago. Before Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, Stone told NPR station KCRW that “The United States and its allies in NATO have been provoking Russia for, since two years now — actually three years over Ukraine” and that the media has been “bloodthirsty” in its coverage of Putin’s supposed invasion plans, and “they have no proof that Russia intends to invade Ukraine; I doubt that they would. I think Russia is concerned only with the Donbas region.”
Anybody reading that would immediately suspect Stone of being naïve and definitely not a good “look” for him. After the invasion Stone seemed to backtrack slightly on these views, claiming “Although the United States has many wars of aggression on its conscience, it doesn’t justify Mr. Putin’s aggression in Ukraine. A dozen wrongs don’t make a right. Russia was wrong to invade.” Nevertheless he claimed that Putin had been “baited” by the U.S. and its allies to invade Ukraine, and that in fact Ukraine was the real “aggressor” in this fight. Stone rather absurdly claimed that Putin only wants the Donbas, because a lot of “Russians” live there and they were being murdered by the Ukrainians, and Putin only wants to “free” them.
Stone’s naïvete is remarkable here. Putin has always referred to Ukraine in terms as being a “natural” part of Russia, which implied an intention to re-absorb the country into the Russian “empire.” The effort to “liberate” the Donbas was just another effort to cut away a significant portion of Ukraine’s economic base, and looking at the map of the current situation…
…we see confirmation of the fact that Putin intends to further strangle the country by cutting it off from the sea. Unfortunately, time has not exactly softened Stone’s support of Putin and his actions; if anything, it has incomprehensibly hardened his views, if this May 17 interview on the Lex Fridman podcast means anything:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ygAqYC8JOQI
Stone mentions a speech that that Putin gave in Munich in 2007 about “world harmony” and he recalled “the animosity towards Putin” and he remembered the “sneer on John McCain's face,” and “eyeballing Putin and hating him and it was so evident that McCain had no belief whatsoever” in him that he was anything but s “communist.” Putin, Stone asserted, was only interested in national “sovereignty” that was “crucial” for “world balance,” as if that is something that China believes in these days. National sovereignty is “crucial to the new world and I think the United States has never accepted that sovereignty is not an idea that they can allow. They (other countries) have to be obedient to the United States’ idea of so-called democracy and uh freedom.”
So far Stone hasn’t said anything too offensive, but he quickly goes off the rails from here. Stone claims that in the past Europe was more “with” Putin than against him, until the U.S. started “meddling” with its Putin-hate. Of course that may have been true to the extent that European countries were hoping that being “nice” to Putin would persuade him to play “nice” himself. But Putin never wanted to be a part of a “pan-European” state; Russia had always seen itself apart from European fold since 1917 and this has not changed.
Yet
Stone naively asserts that “the big thing for America was always to keep NATO
and Europe in its pocket as a satellite and with this recent war of course
they've succeeded beyond all their dreams. The Russians have fulfilled the
fantasy of the United States to finally be this aggressor that they have
pictured for years.”
Besides forgetting that Putin has been meddling in the sovereignty of most of the breakaway former Soviet “republics,” Stone seems to completely misread the American public’s view on Putin and Russia. Whatever is happening now he brought upon himself. Putin doesn’t “respect” the sovereignty of other countries if they interfere with his master plan of reinventing the old Russian Empire/Soviet Union. People in this country don’t want a war with Putin or Russia; they just want him to pick up his toys and go home like a good little boy. After all, Ukrainians are “just like us,” and we wouldn’t like it if somebody was doing what Russia is doing to “us.”
Stone goes on to claim that Putin was such a peace-loving man that in his interviews with Putin, Stone “heard” him claim “he always referred to the United States as our partners and I said ‘will you stop using that word they're not’ and he was a little bit slow in waking up to uh what the United States was doing.” Well whose side is Stone on, anyways?
Stone asserts that Putin wouldn’t be in power for 20 years unless he was “popular.” Stone is remarkably naïve about how Putin stayed in power and maintained “popular” support. He doesn’t mention the infamous apartment bombings that Putin was accused by at least one former intelligence agent, who “mysteriously” died of poisoning in the UK, of orchestrating himself as a false flag operation to drum-up support for a war against the rebels in Chechnya—as well as the assassination of opposition leaders, journalists and expatriates, and even today is criminalizing any opposition or contrary reporting about the invasion in Ukraine.
According
to Stone, he found Putin “to be a human being. I just found him to be
reasonable and calm. I never saw him lose his temper and I mean you have to
understand that most people in the Western way of doing business get emotional.
I don't see that, I saw him as balanced man as a man can be.” OK. Does he think
Putin is an “honest man”? “I do.” Of course this all contradicts reports that
Putin is on the cusp of dementia and has been acting like Hitler in his last
days in the bunker.
Stone claims that Putin was “confused” about “this accusation of poisoning against this person and so forth and he'd explained it to me in I think in the very clearest ways that I understood and he said to me once most of these people who write this stuff about Putin are going off the internet” which “has really been a source of a lot of fractured facts.” Claims that Russian troops are committing war crimes and bombing and killing civilians are responded to thus by Stone: There is “no proof of it, there was just these accidents of war but all of a sudden it was a campaign of criminality and they were talking about bringing Putin into a war crime trial, well why didn't they talk like that when Iraq was going on and Bush was killing far more people or for that matter.” Well, probably because the U.S. military was keen not to target civilians because in the U.S. (unlike in Russia) we have a free media that will report “inadvertent” civilian casualties no matter how small in number.
While Stone bemoans the continued existence of NATO, in regard to Ukraine Stone tells us this: Where was the media when Ukraine was killing civilians in Donbas and Luhansk (the other “breakaway republic” in Ukraine’s sovereign territory) from 2014 to 2020? That’s the only reason why Putin decided to invade Ukraine and “free” the people in the Donbas region, Stone asserts. Of course the rest of us know that the reality is that after the easy victory in Crimea, Putin set his sights on Donbas and armed the Russian separatists there to conduct an ongoing military campaign which likely included the presence of Russian troops. Of course Putin had hoped this operation wave been finished already, but it’s gone on a bit too long, and so “daddy” has to come in to finish the job.
Stone never actually addresses the sovereign rights of Ukraine; he “faults” Ukraine for building up troops on the Donbas “frontier,” conveniently neglecting to mention that Donbas is actually part of Ukraine’s sovereign territory. He goes on to assert that warnings of an imminent invasion by Russia were a “false flag” operation by the U.S. government with this bizarre statement: “When you create this propaganda that they are going to invade and then when they invaded the United States was completely ready and all their allies were completely ready for the invasion, so why did Putin do that? He fell theoretically into this trap set by the United States that here you're telling all your allies across the board they're going to invade but why do you think he did it? So here is it madness or is it no strategic calculation; perhaps this one I cannot answer you faithfully” before going into this bizarre tangent:
“Mr Putin has had this cancer and I think he's licked it but he's also been isolated because of Covid and some people would argue that the isolation from normal activity which he was when he was meeting people face to face, but all of a sudden he was meeting people across the table uh a hundred yards away or whatever 10 yards away it was very hard to perhaps he lost touch uh with contact with people. So it's not just power it's perhaps he thought in his mind that there would be a faster resolution because the Ukrainian army had folded so many times in the past and that they were only backed-up and they were stiffened by the resistance of the Nazi uh or Nazi-oriented battalions..”
Uh, what? Is Stone allowing himself to be a willing organ of Kremlin propaganda there? If there are any reasons why Ukrainians might actually hate Russians, they are completely lost on Stone. It gets worse: “What people don't understand is that Ukraine since 2014 has been a terror state and they've been run, you know, anytime a Ukrainian has expressed any uh any uh understanding of a Russian-Ukrainian position they've been threatened by the state. From 2014 to 2022 there's been a set of hideous murders that people don't even know about it.”
At that point Stone completely lost me. Ukraine may not be an “innocent” state, but to try to justify Putin and his actions over the past 20 years and into this unjustified war where thousands of civilians have been deliberately targeted, including in schools and hospitals, in this way doesn’t win him any converts to his “perspective” on the matter; it just makes him look like naïve at best, and at worst, well, pick your poison. It is unfortunate, because Stone has in the past made useful commentary about the crimes the U.S. has committed throughout its history against weaker countries for supposedly ideological but largely economic reasons.
But most Americans—and the rest of the world—see the Russian invasion of Ukraine as a “moral” issue no different that the need to stop the Nazis during World War II. Stone is clearly in the eyes of most people on the wrong side of the moral equation here.
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