Stone-age conspiracy

Editorial

The filmmaker Oliver Stone is putting the final touches on a 10-part Showtime miniseries called The Secret History of America. To promote awareness of the project, he could not have done much better than an interview with London’s Sunday Times this week.

Stone said Hitler was “an easy scapegoat,” accused Jewish-controlled American media of hyping the Holocaust and had nothing but praise for today’s most contemptible dictators, including Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Hugo Chavez. He contends that Hitler and Stalin have been caricatured by historians and promises to put two of the 20th centuries’ most ruthless mass murderers “in context.”

Providing a diversion from an American commentariat that can’t take its eyes off the unfurling madness of Mel Gibson, Stone’s interview hashed over seemingly every “touchy” subject in recent history.

“There’s a major lobby in the United States,” Stone told the Sunday Times, referring to guess who. “They stay on top of every comment, the most powerful lobby in Washington. Israel has f—ed up United States foreign policy for years.”

Perhaps knowing that nothing is better for headlines than dissing the Jews, Stone’s contention that Israel is the tail wagging the American foreign policy dog was followed up with a cruel diminishment of the magnitude of the Holocaust.

“Hitler did far more damage to the Russians than the Jewish people,” Stone helpfully pointed out. “Twenty-five or 30 million [killed].”

There is a qualitative difference, it is vulgar to even have to point out, between a deliberate genocide aimed at wiping from the human population an entire people, on the one hand, and the outcome of conventional, albeit unprecedentedly brutal, warfare. More crude it is to point out that, comparatively, while the Russian deaths of the Second World War were enormous and catastrophic on an individual and national level, they did not amount to the destruction of one-third of that people’s entire population, which was Hitler’s achievement against the Jewish nation.

It is not hard to identify Stone’s sympathies, given his sympathetic approach to Hitler and his recent tête-à-têtes with the Iranian president. After the meeting, Stone condemned American policy vis-à-vis Iran as “horrible.”

“Iran isn’t necessarily the good guy,” Stone said. “But we don’t know the full story!”

Ahmadinejad has promised to wipe the Jews of Israel from the face of the earth and is developing atomic weapons to try to do precisely that, but Stone wants more information. The echoes of the 1930s are beyond ominous. Stone’s words would make great dialogue for a script about the pacifists, appeasers and those who simply denied that Hitler meant exactly what he said.

Even Stone’s invocation of the hackneyed concept of a “lobby” is suspect. The assumption of Jewish control is prefaced on the belief that even as Jews dictate the facts, the facts do not merit support in or of themselves and, therefore, the only way Jews can get people on their side is through coercion. Therefore, American foreign policy is guided not by any moral commitment to the only democracy in its region, to a sense of shared values, to geostrategic needs or the imperative – in this environment now, ironically, virtually unspeakable – that the Jewish people deserve sovereignty and peace. No, the only reason the United States makes common cause with Israel is because of sinister behind-the-scenes manipulation: the classic form of a familiar prejudice.

Perhaps the fatal flaw in the lobby conspiracy theory is that, if such nefarious lobbying is taking place, it is having tremendously little impact. Jews may be contesting, as Stone suggests, every lie and slander against us, but it doesn’t stop the lies and slanders from piling up. We may be howling antisemitism at the slightest slight, but it doesn’t seem to stop the antisemitism from being expressed more creatively every day, as Stone evidences.

Just as the perpetual charge that Israel is perpetrating “ethnic cleansing” or a “holocaust” on Palestinians is refuted by the facts – the Palestinian population is soaring – the accusers don’t acknowledge that their assumptions about Jews are similarly self-refuting.

Though Stone sees Jewish manipulation and power, a clear-eyed review of the facts suggests the world today has Jews on the ropes. The United Nations condemns Israel like that is its full-time job. Hatred and incitement to genocide come not only from Middle Eastern tyrants, but from English clergymen and Canadian bloggers. Having been chased from every Arab- and Muslim-majority country in the past half-century, Jews are again fleeing Europe, Sweden – Sweden! – being the latest place where life as a Jew is increasingly untenable.

What, Stone should ask himself, is the purpose of controlling the media, foreign policy and the world if, even with all that power, it is impossible to persuade the world to let you be, to live in peace or to prevent the murder of one in every three of your people? We await his “secret history” to find out the truth.

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