Oliver Stone, producer of the so-called documentary JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass, was recently interviewed on KPFA radio about Russia's invasion of Ukraine. And guess what - he not only blames the United States but then relates it all back to the JFK assassination. In fact, he gets upset that the host wants to talk about Ukraine and not about the assassination.
Here is an excerpt from a transcript: (from 4:55)
Oliver Stone: The United States is not going to stop. This is a great victory for the neoconservatives, for Biden and his group, and Victoria Nuland and that gang, who are really kind of aggressive. The aggression of the United States is going to continue and they're going to win, to a certain degree, they'll go on against China, maybe Taiwan, and with Russia, they can keep putting pressure on Russia, until they get what they want, which seems to be regime change. None of which promises well for the world because it will go to war. Russia is not going to give up. They are a nuclear power and they'll be a nuclear power for a long time. And they are very smart. I don't see it ending well. Unless we change our attitude. As I say at the end of, you didn't read the last paragraph, because to me, it's a shame. That we never got along. We could have gotten along, if we hadn't been hardheaded about it. And hated them so much since 1918. We could have been a grand partnership. It could have been us and them. With China too. But there was no reason after the 1990s to go to war, to go to this mentality, that we had to destroy this government. They were not communists, even if they were, they were not communists, they were capitalists. And that's what they wanted. They wanted to join and be part of the European experiment. It's a shame, from the beginning, and the last paragraph I write about it. It's heartbreaking. There was no need for this. And America was not even under threat. We had two oceans. Doing well, Why did we create tension? Because of the military-industrial complex. Because of the money. Because of the budgets. Who else is driving this country? We are under the control of this military autonomy, as well as intelligence agencies. I thought we were going to talk about JFK, because it ties into the JFK documentary, that was released. Right. That's what you told me.
This is the great political thinker who can tell us the truth about the JFK assassination?
He's blaming the Russian invasion of Ukraine on the United States. He even says "they'll go against China, maybe Taiwan." Maybe Taiwan? Has Oliver Stone not noticed that Taiwan is under threat from China?
Does Oliver Stone not realize that Russia is not a capitalist country - it's an oligarchical kleptocracy.
I found it hard to listen to the whole show. But at no point does Oliver Stone show any concern for people of Ukraine.
And then he said this: (22:39)
Oliver Stone: Maybe it's time. America has lost its mind. So maybe it's time that we do blow ourselves up. Or else blow up the other side. But then we're going to be blown up too.
Notably, too, the NATO enlargement that began in the 1990s did bring Russia into NATO-adjacent structures: first the Partnership for Peace program in 1994, then the NATO-Russia Council in 2002. Both not only provided a framework for military cooperation—including NATO assistance to Russia in such areas as job training for decommissioned officers—but stipulated that NATO would consult Russia about its security concerns and possible threats. NATO-Russia cooperation was only suspended in 2014 after Russia’s annexation of Crimea and (first) invasion of Ukraine.
George W. Bush has been criticized for his push to get Ukraine and Georgia on a NATO membership track in 2008 (over objections from France, Germany, and the United Kingdom). But it is worth noting that by then, the Kremlin had already undertaken a number of aggressive actions in response to those countries’ “color revolutions,” which ousted pro-Moscow regimes and sought more radical reform.
Should we blame the West?
Blame-the-West narratives often claim that Russia was never given a real chance to integrate into the free world because the United States, drunk on Cold War triumphalism, treated it as a defeated enemy rather than a partner. But this is a highly skewed and selective account of history after the Soviet collapse.
It leaves out massive Western economic aid to Russia (totaling $55 billion just in 1992-1997 alone, not counting private charity and business investments). It leaves out the extent to which Boris Yeltsin, the first president of independent Russia, was treated as a hero in the United States early on; his cordial relationship with Bill Clinton—whose first trip abroad as president, in April 1993, included a meeting with Yeltsin in Vancouver—became a symbol of the new partnership between the two countries. In the mid-1990s, CIA reports detailing rampant corruption in the Yeltsin administration and the pocketing of aid money by high-level officials were reportedly rudely snubbed by Vice President Al Gore. And, as a show of political respect, Russia was included in the annual forum for leaders of the world’s top industrial democracies—first in an informal “G7+1” arrangement, then from 1998 onward as a full member of the G8—despite the fact that neither its economic performance nor the state of its political institutions qualified it for membership.
While the United States and the other democracies certainly made their share of mistakes, the main reasons this beautiful friendship went south lay within Russia itself. Among them were the corruption, incompetence, and robber-baron mentality that bedeviled the transition to a market economy; the failure to grapple with, and fully confront, the horrors of the country’s Soviet legacy; the profound ambivalence on whether integration into the West should be seen as liberation or occupation; and the widespread sense that the loss of empire was a humiliation and not being feared was a cause for regret. All these trends began early on, when elections for the Russian State Duma in 1993 and 1995 resulted in a parliament dominated by ultranationalist populists and Communists. Putin harnessed and used that energy in a way that, for a while, made many people in Russia and in the West praise him as a guarantor of moderation and stability. Now, the imperial chickens have come home to roost. NATO had nothing to do with it. If anything, the threat of aggression from Russia was the cause of NATO enlargement, not the other way round.
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