Oliver Stone’s Latest Travesty

by Ron Radosh

Ronald Radosh is an Adjunct Senior Fellow at The Hudson Institute, and a Prof. Emeritus of History at the City University of New York's Queensborough Community College. He is a Presidential appointment to the Public Information Declassification Board, for a term extending from 2007 to 2010. He is the author or co-author of 14 books, including The Rosenberg File (1983 and 1997) and Commies: A Journey through the Old Left, the New Left and the Leftover Left (2001). This is an excerpt of an article that appeared at Pajamas Media.

This weekend, Oliver Stone’s new documentary, South of the Border, his ode to Hugo Chavez and South and Latin America’s new quasi-Marxist and not so quasi dictators, has opened in New York City and Los Angeles, and will open nationwide in a week. It had a showing this past Wednesday at the AFI Silverdocs Festival in the Washington, D.C., area, and my article about it appears today in the weekend edition of the Wall Street Journal. I argue therein: “What Mr. Stone and his writers have presented is a standard far-left narrative that is part of a long line of propaganda films, a modern American version of the old agitprop. There are no dissenting voices in this film. Nor is there any mention of the fact that Mr. Chávez has closed down television and radio stations that disagree with him and arrested dissenting political figures.” The film is what you can expect from the likes of Oliver Stone, a virtual know-nothing who uses his celebrity and acclaim as a film director to spew out hatred for the country that has made him wealthy and influential.

Writing in the New York Times, Larry Rohter came up with many other examples of distortions and omissions in the movie. He notes that the “78-minute South of the Border is meant to be a documentary, and therefore to be held to different standards. But it is plagued by the same issues of accuracy that critics have raised about his movies, dating back to JFK. Taken together, the mistakes, misstatements and missing details could undermine Mr. Stone’s glowing portrait of Mr. Chávez.” Rohter goes on to pinpoint some of these in stunning detail.

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