Oliver Stone easily stands out among the handful of directors who brought us up close to the truth of Vietnam, and the sheer ugliness of our foreign policy. Kubrick (Full Metal Jacket), Coppola (Apocalypse Now!) and Hal Ashby (Coming Home) also contributed powerful indictments to such wars, but overall Hollywood (movies and tv) has largely concentrated on whitewashing the purposes and crimes of US imperialism. |
Interviewed by Anya Parampil, The Grayzone
Legendary director Oliver Stone (Platoon, Wall Street, JFK, Born on the 4th of July, Salvador, and the indispensable series of interviews with Vladimir Putin) has just released the first volume of his memoirs, Chasing the Light (reviewed here). This video presents a wide-ranging interview with Red Lines host Anya Parampil. Self-effacing for a man of such stature as artist and political activist, Stone touches on many things rarely or ever discussed by the mainstream media: the barbarism of US imperial wars; the training of death squads and support for terrorists; the refuge given on American soil to war criminals and traitors to their own people after their collaborationist regimes have been finally overthrown at immense cost to patriotic populations. That's how we end up as the sewer of the world—which is of course OK with the ruling 0.001% for whose interests these people fought— harboring Nazis, Cuban gusanos, Vietnamese and Iranian collaborators, Venezuelan fascists, and so on, all constituting a rabidly rightwing element further pushing the national temper to anti-democratic forms of governance. Truthtellers like Oliver Stone face a thankless task in America, the brainwashed. In a recent interview on CBS Late Night with Steven Colbert, the audience, responding to insidious cues by the host, literally booed Stone.
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