On History: Tariq Ali and Oliver Stone in Conversation

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In early 2009, I received a phone call from Paraguay. It was Oliver Stone. He had been reading Pirates of the Caribbean: Axis of Hope, my collection of essays on the changing politics of Latin America, and asked if I was familiar with his work. I was, especially the political films in which he challenged the fraudulent accounts of the war in Vietnam that had gained currency during the B-movie years of Reagan’s presidency.

Stone had actually fought in that war in the US Infantry, which made it difficult for others to pigeonhole him as a namby-pamby pacifist. Many of his detractors had avoided the draft and were now making up for it by proclaiming that the war could have been won, had the politicians not betrayed the generals. This enraged Stone, who detested the simplistic recipes now on offer in every aspect of American domestic and external politics. In the original Wall Street (1987), for instance, he had depicted the close links between crime and financialized capitalism that ultimately led to the crash of 2007.

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