Skip to main content

Mr. Gorbachev, Tear Down This Wall!



Much of Episode 8 of Oliver Stone's Untold History of the United States focuses on the relationship between Reagan and Gorbachev, highlighted by Reagan's famous speech at Brandenburg Gate in 1987.  Stone skips around a lot in this episode, following little chronological order, but he does provide an entry to the Reagan years through Ford's and Carter's failed administrations.

Of note was the Halloween Day Massacre which occurred in October 1975 when Ford purged his cabinet of moderates and brought Cheney and Rumsfeld on board.  Two figures who would come to haunt American politics.  In turn, Stone blames Brzezinski  for leading Carter down a dark alley on foreign policy by instigating the Soviet-Afghan War with support of counter-insurgency groups in Afghanistan who were antagonistic to the Soviet-backed government.


Ollie uses these incidents as a set-up for the heinous foreign policy set by Reagan, which was pushed by neo-conservative think tanks led by Richard Perle and religious leaders like Jerry Falwell, although surprisingly Stone doesn't talk much about the growing "moral majority" in the Republican ranks.  Instead, he notes a book by Claire Sterling, The Terror Network, which apparently had a profound influence on William Casey, who Stone credits as being Reagan's top foreign policy adviser.

Then comes a long laundry list of all the counter-insurgency efforts the US supported in Central America, with money and training funneled through the US Army School of the Americas at Ft. Benning, with additional training in Panama.  There is even a clip from Stone's film, Salvador, to highlight the terror supported by the US at this time.

For the most part, Stone is spot on with his allegations, but one is left to wonder why he adheres to this line that the Soviet Union was a minor player in all this, and that the US had essentially invented an "Evil Empire" as an excuse to build its massive military-industrial complex.  He even castigates Carter for increasing defense spending during his administration despite all his talk of promoting human rights abroad, blaming his administration for dragging the Soviet Union into a war in Afghanistan in 1980.  Much of the statistics Stone cites about Soviet arms came out after 1991.  During the Cold War the Soviet Union padded its numbers, essentially taunting the US into an Arms Race.  All part of the "realpolitik" established during the Truman years.


Stone sees Gorbacev as the Soviet Henry Wallace who ascended to power in 1985 and sued for peace with the US and complete nuclear disarmament in talks in Geneva and Reykjavik in 85 and 86.  Unfortunately, Reagan was too much guided by Richard Perle, and not the advice of Charles Schultz and Paul Nitze, to heed the call for disarmament, preferring to hold onto his "space fantasy," which purportedly killed the deal. Not surprisingly, Ollie gives Gorby all the credit for the breakdown of the wall, and views Reagan as a "befuddled old man" at the end of his tenure, which was mired in the Iran-Contra affair.

It will be interesting to see how Stone deals with Gorby in the subsequent episode, especially as he cracked down on independence movements in the Soviet Union, notably in Lithuania on January 13, 1991, while Bush prepared the US for battle in the Persian Gulf War.

One very salient point that Stone notes is that Reagan's 1987 veto of a bill that would have made the Fairness Doctrine law paved the way for right-wing media moguls like Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes, dramatically reshaping mainstream media in America. Ailes was one of Reagan's campaign consultants, noting that broad "themes," not details won elections.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

  Welcome to this month's reading group selection.  David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908.  At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades.  Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society.  I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran.  Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, noting the gro

Dylan in America

Whoever it was in 1969 who named the very first Bob Dylan bootleg album “Great White Wonder” may have had a mischievous streak. There are any number of ways you can interpret the title — most boringly, the cover was blank, like the Beatles’ “White Album” — but I like to see a sly allusion to “Moby-Dick.” In the seven years since the release of his first commercial record, Dylan had become the white whale of 20th-century popular song, a wild, unconquerable and often baffling force of musical nature who drove fans and critics Ahab-mad in their efforts to spear him, lash him to the hull and render him merely comprehensible. --- Bruce Handy, NYTimes ____________________________________________ I figured we can start fresh with Bob Dylan.  Couldn't resist this photo of him striking a Woody Guthrie pose.  Looks like only yesterday.  Here is a link to the comments building up to this reading group.

Team of Rivals Reading Group

''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005