From Michael Moore: http://michaelmoore.com/words/mike-friends-blog/sean-wilentz-wrong-untold-history-wrong-history-general
By Jon Schwarz
February 22nd, 2013
Sean Wilentz is a fancy professor of history at fancy Princeton, and a personal friend of Bill and Hillary Clinton, two extremely fancy Democrats. And as he recently explained in the New York Review of Books, he hates Untold History, the new book and Showtime documentary series by Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick.
A quick glance might give you the impression Wilentz’s grudge is all about a seemingly obscure, dusty corner of history (Henry Wallace and the 1948 election) that doesn’t affect anyone’s life today one way or the other. But it’s not. Wilentz is pissed off because he understands Untold History is a damning indictment of an entire worldview – that of his political patrons and all comfortable establishment historians like him. And that worldview is genuinely a matter of life and death for all Americans in 2013. If you’d prefer that the plane you’re taking next week not get hit by an surface-to-air missile liberated by Islamists from Libya’s stockpile, and that you not personally get torn into several large chunks at 7,000 feet, you really should pay attention to this.
Untold History, and hence Wilentz, spend lots of time examining the aftermath of World War II in the late 1940s; it was a critical period of U.S. politics, one that’s determined our path ever since. As Wilentz accurately writes, ”the beginning of the cold war divided American liberals and leftists of various stripes,” as the liberals mostly got what they wanted and the leftists did not.
Cold war liberals of the time, exactly like Wilentz today, would have preferred not to share power with the paranoid, racist neanderthals of the U.S. right. (The neanderthals of 1948 didn’t read “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” in the New Yorker and were terrible at sophisticated discussions of existentialism at Georgetown dinner parties.) However, the liberals were even less eager to share power with genuine, unfancy leftists – especially because the liberals agreed with the right that the cold war was forced upon the U.S. by the Soviets and was mostly or wholly defensive in nature.
Meanwhile, the leftists of various stripes believed the cold war might largely be avoided – but that powerful sectors of U.S. society found it to be the perfect cover for aggressive policies they would have wanted to carry out even if the Soviet Union had never existed. Leftists also believed there was a natural constituency for endless war in the White House. As Clark Clifford, then Truman’s White House counsel, wrote to him as the cold war was dawning: “There is considerable political advantage to the Administration in its battle with the Kremlin…In times of crisis, the American citizen tends to back up his President.” Moreover, as Wilentz says, leftists saw liberal anticommunism “as virtually indistinguishable from – indeed, as complicit with – the anticommunism of the right.”
Wilentz is incredulous that Stone and Kuznick are resurrecting this perspective, something liberals like himself believed had been dead and buried for decades. That’s what he’s angry about: that they’re on the New York Times bestseller list and premium cable saying things that all properly educated people know are wrong.
But are they? Now, with twenty years of post-cold war history behind us, we should be able to judge.
Continue reading at: http://michaelmoore.com/words/mike-friends-blog/sean-wilentz-wrong-untold-history-wrong-history-general
