Crashing a Red Oliver Stone party: Summer, 2010

The great Ronald Radosh is sounding another warning about Oliver Stone’s latest upcoming atrocity: “The Untold History of the United States.”

“Untold”, of course, is more of the same of what we have come to expect from Hollywood “Historians” – which will sound like it comes from the old Soviet Union or from a Ron Paul foreign policy address.

But in the Summer of 2010, I had the opportunity to do one of my favorite things: grow a beard and crash a Red party. This time, is was a screening of documentary “South of the Boarder” – with guests of honor Oliver Stone (the director) and Tariq Ali (a doctrinaire Communist).

That Summer I was taking classes on Latin America – a department which is about as pink as it can be (for example, in one class we watched a documentary by the Marxist Rigoberta Menchu, who had been exposed as a Castroite propagandist, a fraud and a liar more then 10 years earlier), and a Professor was offering extra credit to go and see the screening. So I went.

After a few hours of Hugo Chavez and Raul Castro talking about how great they are and how the Americans are out to get them, the film ended and Stone started to take “questions” – like “Can there even be a democratic form of capitalism?” and “Oliver!!! Thank you for showing what’s REALLY going on!!!” (I know, that’s not a question, but that was pretty much beside the point) and one guy that could barley speak english who raised his hand and, when called on, got up and started selling shirts promoting the release of 5 Cuban terrorists who murdered American civilian Search and Rescue workers (the left, in typical Orwellian fashion, claim the latter are the real terrorists) … and so on and so forth.

And then, it was my turn:

Mr. Stone, as a Vietnam Veteran you took an oath to defend the Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic – [Stone nods, big smile] – Is Communism a threat to the Constitution?

The crowd made a startled and painful grown before going silent. With his smile gone and all eyes on him, Stone rubbed his chin in obvious surprise for a few moments before he answered: “No, I don’t think so. Because, as Jefferson said, all theories must compete in the market of ideas.”

The Q&A session went on from there, but after that it was basically over.

Nothing spectacular, of course. But since he is now going to venture into that area specifically, I though it would be a story worth telling.