Oliver Stone on His Next Project, Martin Luther King and his View On President Obama

LINK TO VIDEO of INTERVIEW AND FULL TRANSCRIPT AT:


http://www.democracynow.org/2013/11/5/oliver_stone_on_his_next_project

OLIVER STONE: Well, you have to say pre-Robert Kennedy. J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI had been very interested in civil rights leaders going back to the 1930s. He bugged them. And he had been—he always thought that the civil rights movement was controlled by Moscow. And he thought the Vietnam students who were protesting against the war were controlled by Moscow. He had informants in all these groups. Hoover represents this—by the way, Hoover goes back to 1919, Woodrow Wilson era, and he was involved in the Palmer raids. He believed—that we deported many leftists in 1919.

AMY GOODMAN: Including Emma Goldman and others.

OLIVER STONE: Including Emma Goldman and Big Bill Haywood. It was—you know, we’ve always had a fear of communism that was disproportionate to what their real threat to us was. And before the revolution, by the way, the propertied—the propertied classes always fear labor.

AMY GOODMAN: So, what has replaced that now, this term "national security," that justifies—

OLIVER STONE: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: —the mass surveillance of Americans and people all over the world.

OLIVER STONE: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: This is under President Obama.

OLIVER STONE: Absolutely. Well, this is an old issue, too. Historically, terrorists—you know, Harry Truman in 1947, the Truman Doctrine, he declared boldly on the floor of Congress that we had to invest $400 million in Greece and Turkey to defeat outside forces. He included terrorists and communists as destabilizing Greece. These are the people, by the way, who fought for the independence of Greece against the Nazis. They became terrorists right away. So, the word "terrorist" has been used very loosely to describe whatever enemy. If you read George Orwell, 1984, the government exists—it’s justified because of terrorists. There are always terrorists in the woodwork.
There are—yes, there are terrorists in the world. They are vile. We should track them down, ad doc, selectively, specifically. Glenn Greenwald has been very articulate about this. You know somebody or has connections to terrorism, I think most people would back that. But when you put the whole thing out over the web and you say everybody in the world is—are potentially suspect, you’re making a different kind of world. You’re making that horrible world that George Bush described when he said, "You’re either with us, or you’re against us." I don’t want to live in that world.

AMY GOODMAN: But either way, you’re being surveilled.

OLIVER STONE: Eigher way, yeah. You have to prove you’re innocent, so to speak.

AMY GOODMAN: So—

OLIVER STONE: I worry about my children about that, and I worry about the future, because Obama, as Peter said, is an intelligent manager. I don’t believe he’s an unreasonable man. I don’t even think he knows exactly what’s going on. But I do fear a situation where if we have another terrorist attack, what’s going to happen? And then, what if we have another Bush as a president, or a right-winger? You know, this is the—the technology in place—


AMY GOODMAN: Would it be very different? As Ari Fleischman [ sic ] said, the spokesperson for President Bush, that President Obama—as Ali Fleischer says, the former spokesperson for President George W. Bush, President Obama is a continuation of what President Bush was doing.

OLIVER STONE: Obama doesn’t have—you know, what I said about vision earlier, about Roosevelt and Kennedy and Wallace, these are bigger men. I mean, I don’t think Obama was given a mandate in 2008. He could have done something. He could have been a Roosevelt. People were comparing him to Roosevelt at that time. He didn’t run with it. He hired—as Peter said, he put Clinton in, and he put Gates in, the economic team from Rubin. I don’t get it. Why didn’t he take his moment? He blew it.
And by doing that, because so many young people, so many people campaigned for him, and he disbanded that organization—that was a grassroots organization he disbanded—he took the hope away from those people who believed that democracy was still possible. You call the show Democracy Now! I was thinking about that. That should be a question mark. You know, you have an exclamation point.

AMY GOODMAN: Would you consider making a film about Edward Snowden?

OLIVER STONE: I think he’d be a terrific subject. Frankly, I don’t know that I can handle it, because there’s so much incoming news. I think Snowden had been very smart, and he’s done the best he can under most difficult circumstances.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Oliver Stone, I want to thank you very much for being with us. We’re going to continue this conversation after the broadcast, and we’ll post it at democracynow.org. This is—this month is the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Dr. King [ sic ]. Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick—of Martin Luther—of John F. Kennedy.

OLIVER STONE: Another one.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s right, 50th anniversary of the March on Washington.

OLIVER STONE: And Robert Kennedy was killed a few months later.


AMY GOODMAN: The Untold History of the United States is Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick’s collaboration, both the book and the multi-part Showtime series, now available on DVD.


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