November 11, 2012
Glenn Garvin
The Miami Herald

RE: Oliver Stone and “eclectic indignation” or how modern American Liberals always remember how to forget – Some comments on your column about the good guys and the bad guys in the “Untold History of the United States”.

Mr. Garvin,

Maybe Walter Duranty was right. Maybe 6,000,000 to 10,000,000 Kulaks died of diabetes or Tay-Sachs disease. Maybe Hitler noticed that the deaths of “a faraway people of whom we know little” didn’t upset anybody in the West. [It should be noted that Hitler turned out to be a much better record keeper, particularly when it came to abattoirs.]

Your backhand snot smack of Stone when he compared America’s relations with Mexico and Canada – “Remind me again, was it Toronto or Montreal to which President Eisenhower sent tanks to put down a revolt, as the Soviets did in Hungary in 1956” – is worthy of bronze remembrance. As an aside, if Eisenhower had sent tanks into Canada, I hope, I mean I really, really hope that his target was Montreal.

The version of the Zhukov/Eisenhower that I heard was that it didn’t make any difference to the Russians whether it was landmines or machine guns. The order was always the same: Charge! It turned out that the Russians had more men then the Germans had bullets.

Speaking of an “alternate universe”, imagine if the 1934 winner of the Pulitzer Prize For Foreign Reporting, Frederick Birchall, the New York Times correspondent in Berlin had been as much the tank for the Gesztapo as Walter Duranty, the 1932 winner and New York Times employee, had been for the KGB?

The poet was right. It was “a low dishonest decade”.

And why did Dr. Seuss, Lillian Hellman, Woody Guthrie, and the as yet unnamed Hollywood 10 think that, from August 22, 1939 to June 21. 1941, Hitler was an OK guy?

Walter Duranty, Herbert Matthews, and Harrison Salisbury…one Helluva Murderers’ Row, no?

What can you expect from a newspaper that opposed Lincoln and wanted to settle with the South? That means they favored slavery, doesn’t it?

Less than 10 feet from where I type there is a framed scroll signed by President Truman. It says that Corporal Leonard Putnam died “in the Pacific area” on May 25, 1945. The “Pacific area” was Okinawa. He was a 42 year old piano salesman from Jersey City, N.J. He was my wife Amy’s uncle.

Directly below it is an autographed picture of Paul Tibbets. He is in uniform standing beside the Enola Gay.

His successful mission cancelled the ticket for the Tokyo Express that had my Uncle John’s name on it. Also, my cousin Jim and Amy’s cousin Andy got to come home, their scars, real and prospective, having stopped on August 6, 1945.

Has there ever been a more powerful nation than the United States was on September 2, 1945? No nation before or since has had the might that we had that day. We rebuilt our enemies, we fed the world, and we gave it up.

I shant be watching it but could you tell me if Margaret Sanger, one of the heroines of modern American Liberalism, is mentioned? If she is does that episode include the inconvenient fact that her writings inspired Hitler when he was assembling the Nuremberg Race Laws of 1934?

I don’t think so.

Being a mAL means you never have to say you’re sorry.







Kevin Smith
WARRIORBARDIT@BELLSOUTH.NET






PS – If Lysenko had been defenestrated would fewer people have starved?