Oliver Stone Commencement Address; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley

Photo by Jane Scherr

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The Dream-State of Recent History

As a filmmaker I have always responded as a dreamer, not as a doer. I don't build houses, I don't make the waters run, pump electricity, explore the universe, doctor people ... all I do is dream. I make some semblance of those Hindu wall paintings that I hope people like because it reflects a dream of theirs. I try to go to the secret heart we all have, the collective unconscious. But the price I pay is that life increasingly seems to me but a dream, a psychological delusion and metaphor, all symbol, that I have witnessed in my lifetime. My critics like to call me "Oliver Stoned," but I feel we all are "Oliver Stoned" because we have to be in order to fully understand the madness of modern times. Don't we all, whether we know it or not, live in the mass delusion of a dream state of recent history? In my short lifetime, I've seen at least seven instances of it on a massive scale.

1. My mother was French. I grew up in France in the '50s and when I was there everyone I spoke to, children my own age, adults, no one ever said one word about the French collaboration with the Nazis in World War II. As you may know now, it was very, very extensive. But everyone I talked to in those years was a member of the French Resistance or in some way had staked out his heroism. It wasn't talked about, that was the point, it wasn't talked about. It took one filmmaker, well more than one but one filmmaker in particular who did stand up, Marcel Ophuls, and his film "The Sorrow and the Pity," to start to open up this aspect of French society that was a wound of denial.
2. I had the opportunity to go to Russia in the early 1980s to write a screenplay about dissidents in Russia under the old regime of Brezhnev, and all the people I talked to, old and young alike, were guilty of amnesia. No one accepted the crimes of Stalin. They treated Stalin like he was a benign grandfather, someone on the order of Winston Churchill. We all know that Stalin committed some of the largest numerical atrocities of this century, millions of people were killed. But they denied this -- there was either an embarrassed silence about their leader or incredible praise. There again, I ran into society in denial.
3. In my own life, as you know, I went to Vietnam. I served over there in the military, once, and as a civilian another time, and I came back to America in 1969 and there was a blanket of silence over Vietnam. It was just not discussed. It was a very strange thing. It was impolite. All the official histories I read of Vietnam were, in my opinion (everyone has a different Vietnam), all absolutely fraudulent. So that's why I wrote Platoon, because I felt if I could do one thing in my life it would be at least to deal honestly with some truth I had experienced in my lifetime and to tell it like it is, as opposed to going along with this silence. Vietnam is still a wound, as you know. Bush and Reagan have told us repeatedly that the war is over, but Vietnam is a state of mind. It's like the French collaboration, or Stalin in Russia -- Vietnam is a sick state of mind that is evident in this country still to this day. I was just at a seminar down in Hampton-Sydney and the undergraduates hadn't done a lot of reading, they didn't know anything about Vietnam. They didn't know what the Gulf of Tonkin was -- which was, of course, one of the most interesting staged events of our lifetime. It led to the declaration of hostility against North Vietnam and was a staged and manipulated event. People forgot that we carpet-bombed Laos and Cambodia. Possibly a million to two million Vietnamese died -- who knows, they don't keep statistical MIA's over there -- but it was a holocaust for that society, and we were very much a part of it.
4. In the mid-'80s I was able to go down to Central America. That was another shock. I was in Honduras and in El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala. I did a film called Salvador. There was a very strong bias towards invading Nicaragua at that time, up until 1986. When I saw the American soldiers in the streets of Honduras and El Salvador, I asked them if any of them remembered Vietnam. These were younger people but there in green uniforms, just like I was in Vietnam a few years before. And they really didn't. They were embarrassed to draw any parallels to our behavior in Central America. I honestly don't feel they knew anything about Vietnam. It was devastating, it was devastating to the shared experience of the country to find its citizens maintained an indifference to its own history.
5. Another example in my lifetime is certainly the John Kennedy killing. I won't belabor it; I made a film about it, some of you people have seen it, but the official historians won't tell you the truth. The polls have always shown a deeply inherent popular distrust of the government version of it, the Warren Commission. The people who control the memory of America, the newspaper, press people, the politicians, they would have you believe that Kennedy was killed simply by a lone nut in a random shooting and will not explore the pattern of events that has dictated our lives from the '60s on. They tell you that Lyndon Johnson didn't change a thing when he became president, that he didn't change the policies of Kennedy. This is a very tricky question, but it is not accurate: there was a significant change of policies under Lyndon Johnson, starting with the day he came into office, his meeting on Vietnam with his chief advisors. They issued, two days after Kennedy was murdered, a new national security action memorandum called 273, which was much more aggressive in posture and tone than national security action 263 which was in effect until that moment. Kennedy had made very strong indications and plans, on paper, not just by saying it, but on paper, that he was going to withdraw by 1965, and it's all in that paper which many intelligent people, in their contempt for Kennedy, continue to deny as some sort of public relations stunt.
6. I think another bogeyman in my life, another dream, is the CIA. To some people they're benign, they don't exist. But I don't think the American people are aware of the strong links this country has to Germany, to the Nazis in World War II, and how much the CIA relied on the Nazi intelligence apparatus to get information against the Russians. I would argue that the Cold War really began in 1944, when we sort of knew that Germany was going to lose, when we started to collect all the smart people that we could in Eastern Europe, and in Germany and even in Russia, to start to fight the Soviet Union. The CIA is very much a part of that. In fact, I would argue that the Nazi scientists came here, the Nazi intelligence people, and they brought with them a Nazi frame of mind which inculcated itself into the American social fabric. What the CIA did through the 1950s and '60s was destabilize foreign governments, use psychological warfare on a scale that dwarfed all Nazi efforts, and basically militarized our country into a state of fighting a Cold War. We were spending enormous sums of money that should have been going into a healthier society, being used only for weapons of destruction. The CIA is still there, it has not gone away. It is probably the largest criminal organization in the world, and has been in the past.
7. Another dream (or nightmare) is that the media industry can control the events of our time through the media, and through that media it becomes the truth. Every night on television you look at Dan Rather and he tries to sell you his interpretation of events, and it's basically the consensus journalism that runs through channels ABC, NBC and CBS. The same story is repeated, the same take on the same story, the same spin. Vary rarely do they go into a deeper look, below the surface. This Afghanistan war business is frightening, the way they kept repeating the same mantra "the Russians did it, the Russians did it." Anyone who studies Afghanistan, and I hope they will, will find that there was a lot of provocation going on in Afghanistan, through Iran; that we provoked the Russians, in many ways, to come into Afghanistan because we wanted to drain them.

Next page: The Struggle for Consciousness

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