On History

Tariq Ali and Oliver Stone in Conversation

Oliver Stone, Tariq Ali

• Publisher: Haymarket Books
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781608461608
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

• The Academy award-winning director of Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July, Wall Street and more, Oliver Stone has enormous name recognition
  
• Stone's most recent project will air on Showtime in 2011, the mini-series Oliver Stone's Secret History of America, which provides an unconventional account of 20th century history.
  
• Tariq Ali has a dedicated niche following as editor of New Left Review, contributor to the Guardian, lifelong political activist and thinker, author of numerous non-fiction titles on politics and history, and as author of five novels comprising The Islam Quintet.

Chapter 1

From the Russian Revolution to the Second World War

Oliver Stone: I’ve always wanted to meet you, and I’m glad to have you here in Los Angeles, and to share this time together. It’s really an honor, thank you.

Tariq Ali: My pleasure.

I’d like to get right into it and ask you about a strong thesis in your book Pirates of the Caribbean, regarding the Russian Revolution. What was its impact on America and what was its impact on the world?

Let us just start with the First World War, which probably was the single most important event of the twentieth century, not recognized as such. We mainly think about the Second World War and Hitler, but it was the First World War that brought about suddenly the death of a number of empires. The Austro-Hungarian Empire collapsed. The Ottoman Empire collapsed. The tsarist empire in Russia collapsed. And on the heels of this arose nationalism, communism, revolutionary movements of different kinds. The Russian Revolution probably would not have happened in that particular way had there not been a First World War, which broke up the old ruling classes, brought an end to the old order. In February 1917, the war is going badly. Russia is in revolution, the tsar has been overthrown. And in February 1917, coincidentally, the leaders of the United States decide that they’re going to enter this war. A total break with isolationism, and feeling that because Europe is changing, and possibly because the changes might threaten them—Bolsheviks are taking over—they have to go in and intervene in this war and sort it out. And suddenly America is aroused. We’ve got to go and fight the Germans, they want to defeat the Germans. And in goes the United States.

So the First World War is the event that drives the United States away from this part of the world in North America and into Europe, and sets it up on the world stage. And that sets the stage for the big confrontations that we saw in the twentieth century. Because the Russian Revolution had a massive impact. It had not simply toppled the monarchy. After all, that had happened in the French Revolution and in the English one before that. That wasn’t new. And the American Revolution had decided to do away with aristocracy and monarchs all together. But it was the hope that came with the Russian Revolution, the feeling that you could change the world for the better, and bring the downtrodden, the wretched of the earth, and put them on a pedestal. That was the aim, that was the hope. And for twenty or thirty years, that hope carried on. It wasn’t until much later that people realized that this hadn’t worked, that the Russian situation had many, many problems of its own. But just the belief that the working-class movement of the world was going to be elevated had a big impact everywhere, including in the United States. Not just on the rulers, not just on the corporations, but on the labor movement.

I think one should never forget that the United States had a very strong tradition of labor militancy. You had the Wobblies, the Industrial Workers of the World, which united all the migrant workers from all over into one big union. The Wobbly Joe Hill used to take the songs of the Salvation Army, and turn them around: “There’ll be pie in the sky when you die.” And all these songs brought to life and unified the labor movement in the United States—people from different parts of Europe who didn’t even speak the same languages. German, English, Norwegian, Swedish, they became one family.

And there was a lot of repression. People rarely talk about it, but there was a lot of repression carried out by the corporations in the United States against the American working class in the 1920s and the 1930s. And I think that that repression played a big part in preventing the emergence, if you like, of a more socialist, more labor party structure in the United States. Politics got stuck at the top. So the Russian Revolution’s impact went very, very deep, and one can’t ignore it.

Would you say the United States went into World War I decisively because of the Russian Revolution, or would it have gone anyway? If Russia had withdrawn from the war, Britain and France perhaps would’ve been overwhelmed by the German military at this point.

Well, I think the combination did it. That the Bolsheviks had raised the demand for land, bread, and peace. They weren’t going to fight in this war. And there’s no doubt that the Germans would have defeated the French.

There was no doubt?

And the British. There’s no doubt that, had the United States not gone in, the Germans would’ve won a tremendous victory. But that on its own wouldn’t necessarily have worried the United States. After all, they could’ve dealt with the Germans as the big European power. But I think they probably felt that they had to intervene to defend present and future US interests in the globe prior to the First World War. The interest of the United States was largely in its own territory, and in South America, which it called its “backyard.”

The United States apparently loaned Britain quite a bit of money for World War I. The bonds totaled several billion dollars, I believe, at the time. These would not have been repaid if Germany had won the war. Would there have been an arrangement reached with Germany?

I think there were ways of reaching arrangements. But the Russian Revolution must have concentrated minds a great deal. Woodrow Wilson, as president of the United States, felt he had to come up with an alternative. And his alternative was national independence, self-determination, but also the Treaty of Versailles. So the Treaty of Versailles was pushed through by Wilson, and the punishment of Germany was directly responsible for the rise of fascism. I don’t think there’s any two ways about that. The way the Germans were treated gave rise to a very virulent national movement in Germany, which later became the Third Reich. All of the early propaganda of the Nazis emphasized that Germans had been dealt a rough hand: the German people are being punished, the German nation is being punished, the German race is being punished, and it’s Americans, the Jewish plutocrats in New York, and their friends in Germany who are uniting against us.

This is decisive. If the Treaty of Versailles had been more evenhanded, or let us suppose that the United States had done in Europe after the First World War what it did after the Second World War—that is, to say that we are perfectly prepared to do business with you and to help you recover—who knows what it would’ve been like.

And if the Versailles Treaty was one element in helping the Nazis come to power, the other element was without doubt the fear of Bolshevism. That the decisions made by the top German corporations, and large numbers of the German aristocracy, which is not often recognized to have backed Hitler and have put him in power was because they were fearful that if we don’t go with Hitler there’s going to be a revolution in Germany. Look what they did in Russia and we’re going to be sunk, so better go with this guy who’s going to save us from the Bolsheviks. The effect of the Russian Revolution was a massive rise of the German workers’ movement. The split inside the German labor movement was between a pro-Bolshevik wing, and a more traditional social-democratic wing. And if you look at all the propaganda of the German nationalists and the German fascists, the threat was always presented as a Jewish Bolshevik conspiracy. So the Jews played two roles. They were either plutocrats or they were Bolsheviks. The pamphlets, the literature, was about Germany fighting against the Jewish Bolshevik conspiracy, and that went straight into the Second World War.

Was not Hitler, to some degree, popular in England? And was not Mussolini popular in the United States? And the Bank of England and the Bank of International Settlements seemed to support Hitler.

Absolutely. I was looking the other day at the first biography of Mussolini, published in Britain in 1926. The introduction was by the US ambassador to Italy, who wrote that Mussolini is one of the greatest leaders that Europe has thrown up, and this is the way to the future—largely because he was seen as a bastion against Bolshevism and revolution, much like Hitler. Winston Churchill adored Mussolini. And in that biography you’ll find quotes from Churchill saying that Mussolini is a very important figure, we support him, and he’s necessary. Churchill always used to spell things out. If the Bolshevik hordes are going to be held at bay, we need people like Benito Mussolini. And later during the Second World War, Mussolini threw these quotes back at Churchill, saying there was a time when the leader of the British people used to like me. What’s happened? And the same with Hitler. There was a very strong element within the British ruling class that wanted to do a deal with Hitler. The British king before he abdicated, Edward VIII, was an open admirer of the Nazis, and after he abdicated, he went and called on Hitler. There are photographs of him and his wife seeing Hitler, being photographed with him. And the reason for that was the same. They said the main enemy we all confront is Bolshevism and the Russian Revolution. So anything that keeps that at bay is helpful.

The British appeasers, as they came to be known, they were extremely right-wing politicians, but they were not irrational. They said if Hitler can be turned against the Russians, that would be tremendous. Let’s use him to wipe out the Soviet Union, and then we can talk. I mean, what they didn’t realize is that if that had happened, the Soviet Union might well have fallen, but it would have made Hitler so powerful he would’ve taken Europe overnight.

If you look at France, when the Nazis marched in—the archive footage of when Hitler went to France after it had been occupied is available—you see cheering crowds greeting him in parts of France. It took some years for de Gaulle and the communists to get their act together and for the resistance to begin. But the traditional anti-Semitism of the French—and their nationalism—was the basis for the Vichy regime, and the collaboration, which most of France quite happily carried through with Hitler. This is something that is not talked about too much but is very important to understand.

You have written about the defeat of the Russian Revolution, and you not only talk about the fifteen or sixteen armies that invaded, but about the change when Stalin took over, and what that did to the working class.

What happened in the Soviet Union was that the revolution was isolated. And it’s the history of all revolutions that when they happen, there is a concert of powers that develops against them. The French found the same thing. The American Revolution had similar problems with the British. After the French Revolution toppled the monarchy and the French Republic was established, every single monarch in Europe saw this as a threat. They were trembling with fear. So you have Germans, the Russians, the English, the Austro-Hungarians trying to establish a reactionary coalition to surround and defeat the French Revolution. And at the head of it was the Prussian aristocracy, the Junkers, always there when needed. And after the Russian Revolution, the same thing happened. All the European powers tried to defeat this revolution, even though they’d just lost millions of lives fighting a crazy war, the First World War. Millions died in that war so that the European colonial powers could have more colonies or maintain their colonies. But that didn’t stop them from trying to defeat the Russian Revolution at its birth. So when you had a civil war started in Russia by the supporters of the tsar, you immediately had sixteen or seventeen armies sent in by the Europeans and other foreign powers to back these people. And that civil war consumed a lot of the energy of the revolution. A lot of the best people who had made the revolution died. Less experienced people, largely rural recruits from the peasantry, were brought up, put into places of power, lacking some of the old traditions of the Russian working class. And historically, the fact is that a lot of the workers of Petrograd, who made the revolution, I think the figures are between 30 and 40 percent of them, died during the civil war, which is a very high figure indeed. And on this basis of new recruits from the countryside grew the power of the Soviet bureaucracy typified by Stalin.

There were two currents within Bolshevism. One was to say there is no way we can make socialism on our own, and so we shouldn’t try it in that sense until we have support from Germany, or France, until the revolution spreads. We need that because we’re a backward country. We need German industry in order to move forward. But with the defeat of the German Revolution in the 1920s, that policy was no longer active, and another current emerged that insisted you could build “socialism in one country.” That was the current of Stalinism.

What year would be the defeat of the Russian Revolution?

I would say that the defeat of the hopes of the Russian Revolution was probably 1929 or 1930, when the big collectivization programs started. Collectivization was essentially an admission of defeat. And the brutality with which that collectivization was imposed on the Russian peasantry left a very deep mark in parts of the countryside, which is why when the Germans entered Ukraine, they were greeted as liberators by many Ukrainians. And if the Germans hadn’t been so reactionary and so deadly, they might have had more impact, but because they regarded all Slavs as lesser peoples, they wiped them out.

Did some of these views come from King Leopold’s campaign in the Belgian Congo?

The European colonial mind saw people as inferior. King Leopold, unlike other colonial leaders, actually had the Congo registered in his own name. So it wasn’t Belgium that owned the Congo, it was King Leopold. It was the Belgian royal family. People talk about the six million Jews who died in the twentieth century. They never talk about the Congolese, and the figures given by Adam Hochschild in his book King Leopold’s Ghost are that at least eleven to twelve million Congolese people were killed by the Belgians in the Congo. There was a massive genocide in that country.

Killed perhaps by their proxies, tribal warfare?

No, they were actually killed as the Belgians were trying to get the rubber plantations going. The way they treated them, the way they showed King Leopold how many people they’d killed, is all documented. They cut off their hands, or their thumbs, and sent them back in parcels to Belgium.

So the greatest enemy of the Soviet Union was perhaps England, would you say, in the postrevolutionary years?

I think England was probably the most intelligent and conscious enemy of the Russian Revolution, seeing it for the threat that it was. But the Germans weren’t too far behind. I think because England was never really threatened by a revolution, the impact of the Russian Revolution in Britain was not as great as it was on the European continent. It was significant, but the reason Britain hated the Russians primarily was because the British Empire was threatened, not because they were threatened internally. Because colonized people in Africa and Asia especially saw the Russian Revolution as a gleam of hope. And the British we...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Chapter 1: From the Russian Revolution to the Second World War
• Chapter 2: The Post–World War II Order
• Chapter 3: The Soviet Union and Its Satellite States
• Chapter 4: Pax Americana?
• Chapter 5: Blowback
• Chapter 6: The Revenge of History