TED'S REDS

...Why all this hullabaloo about a television series...

...moral-equivalence ideology that benefits from a technique once described by Joseph Schumpeter: “Selective information, if in itself correct, is an attempt to lie by speaking the truth...

...General Lucius D. Clay, U.S...

...ten rotten egg...

...And that’s exactly what Turner’s CNN series never manages to do...

...I am suggesting something much worse—the fullflowering of a pass...

...I do not believe that it is simply because the Kremlin wanted to rule the world, although it did...

...The Cold War was the outgrowth of the deliberate misunderstanding of Soviet aims and the pretending by Churchill and Roosevelt during World War II that the Soviet Union could be a trustworthy postwar ally and in time become a democratic society...

...Soviet general Nikolai Detinov explains that the outcry when the Soviet Union pointed its new SS20 missiles westward was unjustified because “no one had any plans to attack Europe using SS20s...

...Because Ted Turner, the billionaire ideologist, is going to peddle this documentary to schools at $230 for a set of twelve videos, two episodes on each one...

...What the film doesn’t do (and perhaps movie documentaries cannot do) is present an explanation of why, once the totalitarian system was installed, the Cold War became inevitable...

...For some that may be a fantasy, but for me, it is my main goal...

...Omitted also in what is otherwise an inspiring episode in the CNN series—the Berlin airlift—is the role of organized labor...

...The series is at its worst in its selection of Soviet apologists, who are allowed to spout forth all kinds of nonsense without refutation...

...scenes from the June 17, 1953, uprising in Berlin...

...American foreign policy in Central and South America throughout the Cold War is dealt with at great length, and everything the United States did there is declared wrong...

...There is no mention of the pleas from State Department advisers like Loy Henderson, Charles Bohlen, and even George Kennan to be cautious in negotiating recognition...

...Is it possible that Turner’s researchers overlooked Richard Pipes’s famous 1977 Commentary report, which, citing article after article in Soviet military journals, showed that the Soviet Union believed it could fight and win a nuclear war...

...Oral history, of course, but we have the documents, the archives, the public trial to confirm Molotov...

...Fidel Castro is the star of this Turner production, with his only rival the onetime president of the USSR, Mikhail Gorbachev—the man of whom Ted Turner once told Time magazine, “Gorbachev has probably moved more quickly than any person in the history of the world...

...And this at a time, as the CNN series shows, when the Red Army encamped on the banks of the Vistula while Polish freedom-fighters, emboldened by a promise of Soviet military support, attempted to retake Warsaw and were annihilated by the Reichswehr...

...Yet as I previewed the twenty-four episodes, fifty minutes each, I was reminded of the timid young English curate who, having been invited to his first breakfast with the bishop, was served a rotArnold Beichman, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, is co-author of The Long Pretense: Soviet Treaty Diplomacy from Lenin to Gorbachev...

...A CIA officer, Paul Henze, does receive a short interview, but he is never asked about his expertise on an event which goes unmentioned in the film: the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II on May 13, 1981 in St...

...They will learn moral equivalence: The Communists shoot students in Tiananmen Square, we shoot them at Kent State...

...the Stalinist trials in Eastern Europe...

...In 1948, Robeson supported the Communist-controlled Progressive party and its willing dupe, Henry A. Wallace...

...Former Soviet foreign minister Alexander Bessmertnykh has argued that the Cold War started not with Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” speech in Fulton, Missouri, on March 5, 1946, but rather three decades earlier with the Bolshevik Revolution...

...The filmmakers have found a Russian woman in Soviet intelligence who confirmed that Roosevelt’s Soviet-owned villa at Tehran was bugged and transcripts of the American discussions were delivered each morning to Stalin’s dacha...

...This is not to say that CNN’s scriptwriters falsify the now obvious in Soviet history...

...Churchill is shown making his “Iron Curtain” speech denouncing the Soviet empire...

...Turner’s series juxtaposes the McCarthy era with the Soviet Gulag...

...Despite the Kremlin’s enormous expenditures, the AFLCIO, the British Trades Union Congress, and the German DGB remained opposed to Moscow...

...Oral history usually suffers from faulty memory and the narrator’s desire to give—as the Grand Poo-bah put it in The Mikado—“artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative...

...Was there no one to explain to CNN that Stalin did everything he could to strengthen Hitler right up to the very June 1941 day of the Nazi invasion, when Soviet freight-cars loaded with war essentials were traveling to Germany...

...Just when you think you’ve seen the last of him, there Castro is again ranting away to the invisible interviewer...

...Stalinism is a concept thought up by the enemies of communism to discredit socialism as a whole,” he told an interviewer in 1986...

...The writer of this episode is Germaine Greer—a woman deeply implicated in the domestic battles of those days...

...It is with McCarthyism and Vietnam that Turner’s anti-anti-communism and claim of “moral equivalence” shows itself most glaringly and where producer Isaacs himself demonstrates a lack of understanding...

...It shows much dramatic footage: the capture, trial, and execution of the Ceausescus in Romania on Christmas Day 1989...

...In his six-hundred-page volume of oral reminiscences, Molotov says, “It cannot be ruled out that they helped us...

...J. Robert Oppenheimer is in the film, but not his nemesis, Edward Teller...

...Similarly, the series makes reference to Roosevelt’s desire to recognize the Soviet Union as soon as he took office in 1933...

...In the United States the Communists in 1940 called political strikes to prevent France from receiving fighter planes it had paid for, and they cheered Hitler when France fell in June 1940...

...The most serious failure of this Cold War series is that it doesn’t ask the question why we didn’t have a Cold War with Britain, France, or any other country...

...Parts of the Turner extravaganza are excellent and parts of it are dreary beyond measure—especially the long sermons on Marxism-Leninism by Turner’s personal friend and duckhunting companion, Fidel Castro...

...Peter’s Square...

...In dealing with the Rosenbergs, the Turner researchers missed Vyacheslav Molotov’s confirmation that the Rosenbergs had indeed been atomic spies...

...TED’S REDS Ted Turner Presents the Cold War on CNN By Arnold Beichman Ted Turner’s new, $12 million CNN series on the Cold War—whose first episode aired on September 27 and which continues every Sunday until April 19—is not without merit...

...As late as 1953, Kennan wrote that America “should never have established de jure relations with the Soviet government...

...Why not a moment to discuss Norman Podhoretz’s Why We Were in Vietnam, which demolishes incredible statements by Greer’s sisters Mary McCarthy, Susan Sontag, and Frances Fitzgerald...

...This will be what our children learn about the Cold War...

...Turner’s researchers overlook some of Gorbachev’s more questionable statements made during his offensive du charme while he was running the USSR...

...And yet, though a television program intended for popular consumption can’t be a historical monograph, the conscientious (as opposed to the tendentious) historian will test his findings against all available evidence...

...This might prove useful to us in the future...

...As late as 1990, he said, “I am a Communist, a convinced Communist...

...Totalitarianism—the unrestrained rule by terror and modern technology, the destroyer of civil society and law, the society in which no one was innocent—was a new social force, said Hannah Arendt, radically different from the tyrannies and dictatorships of the past...

...Were there no anti-Communists with impeccable civil rights records who might have been interviewed...

...But we should not talk about that...

...Or Paul Hollander’s Political Pilgrims: Western Intellectuals in Search of the Good Society...

...But if the failure of Turner’s extravaganza to capture the international aspects of the Cold War derives from the general inability of film to present that sort of history, the CNN series fails as well where it might have succeeded: in presenting the domestic aspects of the Cold War...

...One of the more striking omissions from the series is the USSR’s signal failure over seventy years to lure Western and Asian trade unions into its orbit...

...The CNN interviewers let the son of the monster Beria get away with his defense of the Stalin- Hitler Pact...

...They will see a few shots of such realists as Zbigniew Brzezinski and Condoleezza Rice, but many more of the likes of the historian Raymond Garthoff— the man who wrote in his book The Great Transition, “A Manichean communist worldview spawned a Manichean anti-Communist worldview...

...Stalin welcomed every Nazi victory...

...CNN might have quoted Diana Trilling, who wrote that “a staunch anti-Communism was the great moral-political imperative of our epoch...

...I am not suggesting that CNN is part of a vast left-wing conspiracy to brainwash our children or the American people about what happened during the Cold War and why the Cold War happened at all...

...Communist parties in the West, uttering obscene cries that fighting fascism was an imperialist plot, sabotaged the resistance of embattled France and Britain...

...The destruction of KAL Flight 007 on September 1, 1983, however, is treated fairly, with a fascinating interview with the Soviet pilot who, following orders, shot down the passenger plane...

...Nothing else explains FDR’s foolish statement in 1945 about the genocidal Stalin: “I think that if I give him everything I possibly can without demanding anything in return, then . . . he will not attempt to annex anything and will work to build a peaceful and democratic world...

...government that we may now say that point by point Joe McCarthy got it all wrong and yet was still closer to the truth than those who ridiculed him...

...The great virtue of Turner’s film is that it brings to life some of the history we have lived through...

...One of the CNN episodes, entitled “Make Love Not War,” deals with the street battle in Chicago at the 1968 Democratic convention and the SDS in the late 1960s and ’70s...

...Wouldn’t it have been of some interest to have sought out Elliot Abrams, onetime assistant secretary of state for Central America, and to have asked him what he thought of the Soviet spokesman’s claim of a handsoff policy towards Guatemala’s Communist party...

...Moving faster than Jesus Christ did...

...Or the seminal writings of Sidney Hook, who described McCarthyism as “cultural vigilantism...

...the 1968 occupation of Czechoslovakia...

...After all, Nikita Khrushchev denounced Stalin in 1956...

...So Stalin, we are told and shown, was a tyrant who murdered millions of peasants, instituted a reign of terror, and established a police state...

...Or there might have been a filmed reference to the liberal journalist, Nicholas von Hoffman, who wrote in the Washington Post in 1996 that “enough new information has come to light about the Communists in the U.S...

...commander in Germany, attested to labor’s contribution in unloading and distributing the two and a half million tons of food, coal, and other supplies delivered day and night between June 1948 and May 1949...

...Or Guenter Lewy’s America in Vietnam...

...While there is no room in the twenty-four film episodes for anti- Communist intellectuals, there is lots of room and sympathy for Paul Robeson, winner of the Stalin Peace Prize in 1952...

...Robeson sang at rallies to protest aid to Britain when that nation stood alone against the Nazis...

...Robeson went around the world,” as William O’Neill put it, “endorsing a political system based on mass murder, forced labor, and the denial of every human right, accusing all who criticized him for doing so of bigotry...

...When his ecclesiastical host inquired how he had found his meal, the curate replied, “Parts of it were excellent, Your Grace...

...Of course, no film based on oral interviews can ever be real history in the way in which great historians write history...

...the 1956 revolts in Poland and Hungary...

...Forgotten is the day—February 27, 1945—when he told the House of Commons: “I know of no Government which stands to its obligations, even in its own despite, more solidly than the Russian Soviet government...

...No one would dare impose on an audience such Castrovian drivel unless driven by his financial backer, which is what must have happened to the series’ producer, Sir Jeremy Isaacs...

...Did it not occur to Isaacs to add an interview or two with Armando Valladares or any other of the thousands of Fidel’s victims...

...Lavrenty Beria’s son, Sergo, reports that he heard Stalin tell his father that the reason for the Stalin- Hitler Pact, signed in August 1939, was that the Soviet Union needed two years to prepare for the inevitable war with Nazi Germany...

...Turner’s Cold War series shows footage of the 1940 murder of fifteen thousand Polish officers near Smolensk—but makes only a glancing reference to the fact that both Churchill and Roosevelt, knowing that Stalin was responsible, said nothing when the Russians blamed the killing on the Nazis...

...You can’t go wrong showing Joe McCarthy—his “five o’clock shadow,” his half-whining, half-droning voice—but is that all there was to it...