In their ten-part cable television documentary series and seven-hundred-page companion book The Untold History of the United States, filmmaker Oliver Stone and historian Peter Kuznick ask: Why does our country have military bases in every region of the globe, totaling more than a thousand by some counts? Why does the United States spend as much money on its military as the rest of the world combined? Why does it still possess thousands of nuclear weapons, many on hair-trigger alert, even though no nation poses an imminent threat? These are key questions. Stone and Kuznick condemn the situation but do not answer the questions. The authors see the post-World War II development of the United States into the world's sole superpower as a sharp divergence from the founders' original intent and historical development prior to the mid-twentieth century. They quote an Independence Day speech by President John Quincy Adams in which he condemned British colonialism and claimed that the United States goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. Stone and Kuznick fail to mention that the United States at the time was invading, subjecting, colonizing, and removing the Indigenous farmers from their land, as it had since its founding and as it would through the nineteenth century. In ignoring that fundamental basis for US development as an imperialist power, they do not see that overseas empire was the logical outcome of the course the United States chose at its founding.
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About Oliver Stone
Oliver Stone was a contemporary American filmmaker. William Oliver Stone is an American filmmaker. An acclaimed director who tackled subjects ranging from the Vietnam War and American politics to musical biopics and crime dramas, Stone has received numerous accolades including three Academy Awards, a BAFTA Award, one Primetime Emmy, three Independent Spirit Awards and six Golden Globes. Read more on Wikipedia →