Erik Kurtz

I often have the feeling that most people are running from history because there's a lot of scary stuff in the rear view mirror and this life of material comfort fools us into daydreaming. Oliver Stone offers us a profound examination of U.S. history. This is a critical documentary that focuses primarily on the 20th century, the World Wars, how each subsequent Presidency grabbed more power and brought the world dangerously close to nuclear annihilation. This is a necessary body of work that reveals the often uncomfortable truth about us. The tension between U.S. capitalism and Soviet communism runs throughout this history, and I have to wonder if we would be a much better country had Henry Wallace been FDR's veep instead Truman. And what if Kennedy hadn't been assassinated? Most of our presidents have done really horrible things and it's hard to find one that didn't let the job go to his head. Did Truman really need to drop atomic bombs on civilian populations? Did Ike really need to escalate the arms race and treat the world's emerging democracies as guinea pigs for the military industrial complex? Why did LBJ need to double down on Vietnam after Kennedy wanted to end the war? Reagan blew an opportunity to improve Russia relations by turning down Gorbachev's offers to denuke. There's a lot of history covered in this series and Oliver Stone has made a documentary that I hope people will take the time to watch in this especially momentus occasion that we find ourselves in the present 2020.