Oliver Stone's Untold History of the United States

[ckaihatsu]

Wanted to mention that this is worth checking out, and is a rather good, mostly even-handed, treatment of U.S. history since the Second World War -- this kind of approach to the topic has been sorely needed, so Stone's (et al) work fills a void in the historiography department.

Oliver Stone's Untold History of the United States

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unt..._United_States

One political matter that remains outside of Stone's scope, though, has to do with the global class struggle, which was momentarily in the public spotlight after the USSR's defeat of the Nazis in World War II.

A political strategic revising of the core understanding and principle of class conflict took hold of the USSR's leadership after Stalin's death:

From 1957 through 1961, Khrushchev openly and repeatedly threatened the West with nuclear annihilation. He claimed that Soviet missile capabilities were far superior to those of the United States, capable of wiping out any American or European city. However, Khrushchev rejected Stalin's belief in the inevitability of war, and declared his new goal was to be "peaceful coexistence".[128] This formulation modified the Stalin-era Soviet stance, where international class struggle meant the two opposing camps were on an inevitable collision course where communism would triumph through global war; now, peace would allow capitalism to collapse on its own,[129] as well as giving the Soviets time to boost their military capabilities,[130] which remained for decades until Gorbachev's later "new thinking" envisioning peaceful coexistence as an end in itself rather than a form of class struggle.[131]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_War

Class conflict, frequently referred to as class warfare or class struggle, is the tension or antagonism which exists in society due to competing socioeconomic interests and desires between people of different classes.

Marx believed that this class conflict would result in the overthrow of the bourgeoisie and that the private property would be communally owned.[15] The mode of production would remain, but communal ownership would eliminate class conflict.[15]

Even after a revolution, the two classes would struggle, but eventually the struggle would recede and the classes dissolve. As class boundaries broke down, the state apparatus would wither away. According to Marx, the main task of any state apparatus is to uphold the power of the ruling class; but without any classes there would be no need for a state. That would lead to the classless, stateless communist society.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Class_struggle

In the 1940s and 1950s within the international communist movement, revisionism was a term used by Stalinists to describe communists who focused on consumer goods production instead of heavy industry; accepted national differences instead of promoting proletarian internationalism; and encouraged liberal reforms instead of remaining faithful to established doctrine. Revisionism was also one of the charges leveled at Titoists as punishment for their pursuance of a relatively independent form of communist ideology, amidst a series of post-World War 2 purges beginning in 1949 in Eastern Europe by the Soviet administration under Stalin. After Stalin's death a more participatory, more democratic form of socialism became briefly acceptable in Hungary during Imre Nagy's government (1953-1955) and in Poland during Władysław Gomułka's government, containing ideas that the rest of the Soviet bloc, and the Soviet Union itself, variously considered revisionist, although neither Nagy nor Gomułka described themselves as revisionists, since to do so would have been self-deprecating.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revisionism_(Marxism)

[KurtFF8]

I just watched the first three episodes. So far I think it's pretty well done