More than three thousand people, mostly poor and indigenous, attended the film’s premiere in Cochabamba, Bolivia, and cheered their side without restraint. “They knew instinctively who the baddies were,” Stone told me in New York. “Unlike here.” The New York Times assigned a veteran hack from the Reagan era—a staunch supporter of the Contras in Nicaragua—to interview us. Perhaps it was tit-for-tat: they wanted to punish us for the disobliging references to the “paper of record” in the documentary. At times it felt as if we were being questioned by a Cold War spook after a trip to a forbidden country. The result was a predictable hack job.
What next? Over dinner at Stone’s house, with his Korean partner Sun-jung, their intelligent fourteen-year-old daughter (the real inspiration for The Untold History), and his feisty eighty-seven-year-old French mother, Jacqueline Goddet, the director asked jokingly whether there were any strong characters left to consider for a movie. “Lenin or Robespierre?” I inquired hopefully. He turned to his mother, a staunch and devout Gaullist, who couldn’t believe her ears. “Robespierre?” she repeated. “Assassin!” That in itself would never be sufficient reason for Oliver not to embark on such a project. An old sinner can’t be stopped from casting the penultimate stone.
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.