Oliver Stone

A health warning is due on this book. It is a polemic linked to a documentary. Usually that should be cause enough for caution but it is generally well written and researched, valuable as a corrective to the standard internal narrative about US foreign policy which is somewhat Pollyanna-ish.

Stone's propensity for conspiracy theory and a curious hagiography surrounding the John F. Kennedy who might have been (reflected briefly in this book) is corrected by a solid research team clearly under show more the able direction of Peter Kuznick and, no doubt, guided by Stone himself.

The result has flaws - too kind to the Russians while the balance shifts into contemporary polemic in the final chapters on Bush and Obama. We have mentioned the over favourable approach to JFK. But these flaws, denying it five stars, do not detract from the achievement.

This is a book that I would like to see in every American high school library, not as the main set text but simply as an intelligent corrective to the conformist almost totalitarian educational training of Americans in the myth of their own cultural and political beneficence.

The best recent history of the US that I have found was critical but measured and by a fellow Brit - David Reynolds' America: Empire of Liberty - https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/154098333 - but Reynolds' vision is definitely not that of Americans themselves.

This is why Stone and Kuznick have done their fellow citizens a service in the age of Sanders, Clinton and Trump. They have held up a mirror to American foreign and international economic policy and shown us an imperial system out of educated democratic control run by psychopaths.

It is rare that I feel much emotion in reading a book nowadays but I found myself seething with anger at times - on the decision-making around Hiroshima and Nagasaki, on the murderous assault on Gautemalan freedom and, of course, the lunacy of Vietnam and MAD.

I used the term psychopath. It is a term I usually avoid using because it over-simplifies the brutal things some people have to do in existential situations and is too easily applied to people stuck in a system like bankers or brokers but here the term often applies.

Some of the activities of the American State, often deliberately obfuscating its actions before the democratic process, often manipulating and subverting it and often backed by legislators whose ignorance can only be put down to the force of ideology, are, frankly and simply, evil. Yes, evil.

This is not to say that most American public servants are evil but then I suspect most ordinary Communist apparatchiki or Nazi civil servants were not intrinsically evil but all served systems that accepted evil acts against civilians and lies to their own people as normal and right.

You will have to make up your own mind after reading this catalogue of horrors and lies but, before getting over excited, you should balance the book with some reading of other texts with a more sanguine view of American exceptionalism and belief in its being a 'beacon on the hill'.

The honest truth is that this book falls precisely into the American trap of seeing everything as black and white rather than many shades of grey. It is the dark to the sunny light of the standard American narrative but that does not make it right. One yearns for a balanced view.

Yet facts are still facts. It is hard to reason away many American State actions which were the more criminal in being based on bad intelligence, poor judgement and the taking of risks that might have led to the immolation of our species let alone tens of thousands of passing peasants.

OK, so the US won and the spectre of communism has now degenerated into a few elderly socialists who can't muster majorities anywhere but the price, as I read it, was too high. It degraded America itself decade on decade until degeneracy became the national norm. Victory was Pyrrhic.

Forgetting the overblown tirade against Obama here (although it is true that he is now mere creature of a system created by his predecessors), each President, perhaps excluding FDR and Clinton I, is held up to scrutiny and found wanting. Bush II was far from uniquely dodgy.

Indeed, one of the benefits of this book is that it cuts through the partisan nonsense and shows us that Democrats and Republicans are really not much better than each other when push comes to shove - though the silence here suggests Clinton I was perhaps a bright point through inaction.

If this is an argument for Clinton II, however, I can't find it in her pronouncements or the text. For some reason, she is a 'hawk' far to the Right of Obama and not quite so different from the world of Bush II as naive Democrats would like to think. She terrifies me ...

As for Trump, words should fail but at least he has the merit of possibly, just possibly, not being answerable to an establishment machinery backing sustained state violence, one that is clearly horrified by his candidacy. If the system is horrified by him, he may have merit!

The American propensity to concentrate on the individual (the President) misses the point that he is always embedded in a system and that this system is imperial, concerned with economic loot and highly militarised. The noble gestures and rhetoric are just icing on a mouldy cake.

The Generals answer to the Commander-in-Chief but he is trapped into compliance with the cultural expectations of competitive but closely knit networks made up of surprisingly few ideologically motivated people with an axe to grind.

Stone and Kuznick bring out the continuities where a few hundred ambitious careerists, lost in abstract models of foreign policy, float like trash on a registered electorate of 153 million souls and coldly and blithely dispose of the lives of others without any existential self-questioning.

One suspects that the system both attracts and promotes a personality type perfectly fitted to serve it as all such systems do - just as the Roman, British and Soviet Empires created their unself-reflective 'types'. There is no reason why the US should be different in this.

What seems to be lacking in the contemporary historiography is an analysis of careers, patronage, ideology formation, interests and connections, such as Lewis Namier once did for the eighteenth century British Parliament - ideology is not top down but centred in group-think.

As with Namier, such a historian might find that this closed elite shared a 'weltanschauung' but pursued self interest within it - questioning nothing but seeking to combine through allegiance to networks (parties) that scarcely differed from each other except in their competition for benefits.

Namier's analysis of a grasping and self interested elite left little room for ideas but eighteenth century Britain did not 'progress' to the American situation where ideas, linked existentially to identity, might become weapons of advantage. Ideas have here paradoxically displaced humanity.

The question is whether Americans who read the standard narrative, the non-American neutral narrative and the dissident native narrative (this book) would still want to change a decayed system that thinks its eighteenth century constitution is sufficient protection against evil.

It was in 1973 that Arthur M. Schlesinger coined the term for the Imperial Presidency as something uncontrollable and prone to exceed constitutional limits. Yet it is that constitution that permits those excesses - taken even further by Bush II and even (as the authors argue) by Obama.

What either Clinton II or Trump could do with these excessive powers (of which a first taste lay in that most sinister of Democratic 'progressive' Presidents Woodrow Wilson) is perhaps what is keeping many centrist liberals awake at night with reason. Neither fills one with hope.

The truth is that liberal Americans are still stuck in their eighteenth century and 'rights' paradigm as Roman intellectuals were once stuck in their republican and 'virtu' ideology as they lurched stage by stage towards Tiberius and Caligula.

In the end, all a Roman could hope for was that the Emperor be a good one. American liberals have found themselves in the same situation, hoping against hope that the next President will be a 'good one'. As Stone and Kuznick show, that is not a likely outcome.

Even Carter gets a coruscating treatment here that does not allow his later saintly persona to get in the way of the facts. Perhaps Clinton I's scarce mention only arises because he was uninterested in foreign policy and Bush I (the best since FDR) had done all the work in apparently taming Russia.

So, all in all, with the caveats, an eye-opening book that might further radicalise the young but not, I hope, into a futile faith in some man in a white hat appearing in the Oval Office but into beginning to think like a European and move from individuals to a critique of the total system.

There is something eighteenth century even today about a monarchical/imperial executive capable of great and monstrous crimes that yet seem not to stir the consciences of the vast number of Americans. Obviously many radicals who voted for Sanders were stirred but he lost!

Americans might be engineered to be horrified by Aleppo perhaps because it is the Russians 'doing it' but not enormously by Falluja or Gaza. One suspects the complaints about Vietnam owed far more to the fears of narcissistic hippies than concern for the slaughter of the Vietnamese.

Sometimes the US was existentially threatened: we must respect its desire for survival and cohesion. Sometimes it acted out of for greed which at least is comprehensible. Sometimes it killed for a theory or a dream or an idea. Frankly, that last makes it not much better than the Soviets. show less

Wow! The Untold History of the United States will tell you lots and lots and LOTS that you didn't hear in school. And it all shows that the U.S. is not a selfless, noble, exception to the rule that great powers behave badly. The book will make some readers very angry; national myths are dearly held. And it will make some others very skeptical. This is not an unbiased work, and there is a lot of selectivity about what facts are included (and what are not).

This book, however, well worth show more reading, whether or not you agree with it. Yes, it's biased,but so is most of the U.S. history we read -- only biased the other way. Moving the point of view helps to clarify current U.S. policy issues. For example, do we really need to have a military establishment that is as powerful as all the rest of the military establishments in the world?

The book begins around 1900, as the European powers scrambled for de jure control of Africa and anything else that wasn't nailed down. At that point, the U.S. (perhaps more subtly) was establishing de facto control of much of Latin America and the Caribbean. The most egregious U.S. imperialist, the authors argue, was not TR, but Woodrow Wilson. They put this in the context of U.S. corporate interests, which they also argue played a key role in getting the U.S. into World War I.

The next part of the book looks at the interwar period and at World War II. Mssrs. Stone and Kuznick show the degree to which anti-communism blinkered U.S. policies. They also remind us of how little of World War II -- in Europe -- was fought by the U.S., and of how much was fought by the Soviet Union.

The discussion of the immediate post-war period is the most interesting in the book. The authors present what is to me a convincing case that dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was NOT necessary. The Japanese, they argue, were desperately looking for a way to surrender, because they were terrified of a Russian invasion. Many U.S. generals and politicos argued against the bombs. One is left with the conclusion that the main reason for the bombs was to scare the Soviets.

From there, the authors proceed to the emergence of the cold war, which they regard as largely the fault of the U.S. They understate, I think, the "contribution" of Stalin's Soviet Union, but by encouraging the reader to look at the cold war from a Soviet point of view they provide an informative vantage point. No real story has only one side.

The part of the book which covers our more recent wars -- Vietnam, and then the Middle East -- is less startling, because U.S. miscalculation and cruelties in those wars have been more widely reported than those in earlier periods. Also, it is in the more recent period that the book seems to me most seriously biased; per Mssrs. Stone and Kuznick, no American president since John Kennedy has done anything that was not almost unequivocally evil.

There are faults in this book. It seems to me to overstate the iniquities of the U.S., to understate the bloody-mindedness of our enemies, and to underestimate the fact that politicians have to deal with social and economic realities. The only real heroes in the book are Henry Wallace and Mikhail Gorbachev -- FDR comes off as a sometime waffler, while JFK comes off as someone who experienced a major change in view shortly before being killed. Also, the book does in some instances take comments out of context, and/or leave off important explanatory information. I look forward to reading the upcoming review in The New York Review of Books, which is (internet gossip reports) most unfavorable.

Despite these qualifications, I think that this is a very valuable book -- though I fear that it may not be read much outside liberal circles. show less

Newspaper comic-strip artist Jon Lansdale (Michael Caine) loses his hand in a road accident. The hand is never found - possibly because it has developed a life of its own and has taken to crawling around in the undergrowth. It's soon following Jon around and murdering everyone that Jon takes a disliking to... and there's plenty of people about that Jon dislikes. The script and direction by Oliver Stone is stupid but always entertaining and just about manages to find a balance between the show more possibility of supernatural horror and whether Jon has simply gone insane and is murdering people in some form of fugue state. There are plenty of odd moments such as a crazy black cat smashing through a window and Oliver Stone staggering around as a drunken bum. Michael Caine puts in a strangely stiff and wooden performance that somehow fits with the subject matter. Like all the rest of the characters in the film he is incredibly unsympathetic, however. "The Hand" has a bad reputation - and it is a bad film - but it still has enough wild and ridiculous moments to make it worth seeing. show less

Much better than its reputation. When it's cold, Conan wears warm clothes, and when it gets really hot, he dresses more or less appropriately. James Earl Jones is hilarious. The special effects are heartwarmingly low tech, red scarves are constantly emerging from actor's clothes during the battle scenes. There is nothing wrong w/ Schwarzenegger's acting. The plot makes no sense, but that's true of a lot of myth and fairy tale, so who really cares.