KING: You have to. He’s hard not to like as a person.
That 20 percent Stone refers to is meant to marginalize and ridicule Chávez’s opponents, not to present their views in a balanced fashion. In fact, the popularity ratings for Chávez have fallen below 50 percent, similar to the fate of another leader on the world stage.
Stone mentioned his three other documentaries, two on Cuba’s long-time Communist dictator Fidel Castro, one on the now deceased Palestinian terrorist and the other on the head of the Palestinian Authority Yasser Arafat. These are people who Stone finds worthy of his praise, as he thinks they are all “demonized” by the U.S. government and media.
And this is where Stone is perhaps at his worst—in defending the suppression of private and independent media, here and abroad. In fact, Stone himself in the film denounces the “private media” in Venezuela when these news organizations and outlets are struggling for their very survival and under constant threat when not actually being taken off the air or abolished by the regime.
Even Larry King, with an obvious understanding of what freedom of the press is supposed to mean, balked at this ruthless approach. After Stone defended Chávez shutting down media in Venezuela for “calling for the overthrow of his government,” King replied that you can do that in our country. Here was their exchange:
KING: He [Chávez] comes down tough on free media, though. You wouldn’t call this an absolute democracy, would you?
STONE: Every democracy is relative, but on the other hand any dictator would not tolerate the degree of opposition in the media. It’s very vocal. It’s like Fox News on steroids down there. You have no idea what it’s like. I mean, they insult Chávez every day, the newspaper headlines, plus the TV stations. Except when you call for the overthrow of the government and that’s when he got upset. And in our country we wouldn’t allow that. We wouldn’t allow that –
KING: Oh, you could call for the overthrow of the government.
STONE: No, you can’t.
KING: You couldn’t?
STONE: It’s called the Fairness Doctrine. It used to exist, and it still does. There’s such a thing as hate speech. You cannot do that in this country.
With these comments, Stone has demonstrated his ignorance on this subject. The Fairness Doctrine required balanced coverage and no longer exists. It was abused, however, by Democratic Administrations which sought to use it to suppress speech by conservatives.
While there is such a thing as hate speech, it is not illegal in this country, except if it can be viewed by law enforcement as integral to a physical assault. What’s more, “hate speech” has become a catch-phrase that is used mostly by the liberals in this country to label things said by conservatives. As such, it has become another effort to intimidate and silence.
When Stone said “You cannot do that in this country,” he must have meant calling “for the overthrow of the government,” rather than hate speech. He may have been referring to the support of some media figures for a 2002 coup against Chávez, but we can now see, in retrospect, that the removal of the would-be dictator would have saved the people of Venezuela—and indeed, the people of the world—from the impact of a dangerous despot. And we do not know, at this point, what he will do next.
It is, of course, perfectly legal to call for the overthrow of the U.S. Government, as evidenced by the proliferation of Marxist and Communist groups which do so. It only becomes illegal when the talk is translated into action that involves force of arms and imminent criminal conduct.
But this talk from Stone about hate speech and so forth was extremely odd, to say the least. A movie fantasizing about the assassination of President Bush was not only allowed, but praised by many on the left.
Demonstrating that his pandering to communists knows no bounds, Stone’s film also includes a kid-glove interview with Raul Castro, Fidel’s brother and current dictator of Cuba, who took over in 2008 after Fidel suffered failing health.
For his part, Larry King had interviewed Chávez last September, an interview that included this exchange about Castro:
King: Your friendship with Fidel Castro, very close?
CHÁVEZ: Profound, very, extremely close. He’s like a father to me, like a father, a political father. I admire him enormously. He is one of the greatest men of the 20th and the 21st century of this hemisphere and of the world.
KING: And he is a communist.
CHÁVEZ: And what’s wrong about that?
KING: You’d like – you’re not a communist. You don’t support.
CHÁVEZ: I am a socialist. Now, I prefer him as a communist than to the capitalist. I have friends who are capitalists. I’m not going to condemn them because they are capitalists.
Oliver Stone’s praise of despicable characters such as Chávez and Castro shows that he is blinded by his ideology, and demonstrates his failure to use his great talents on behalf of those suffering under these regimes.
In April I interviewed Maria Conchita Alonso for AIM’s Internet radio show, “Take AIM,” in order to provide quite a different version of what is happening.
Ms. Alonso, a former Miss Venezuela, became a popular actress and singer in Latin America and then in the U.S. In March she wrote a public letter to Sean Penn for his public comments in praise of Hugo Chávez. Alonso, who was born in Cuba, but fled along with her family from the Castro regime, to Venezuela, where some of her family still resides, had a lot to say about both countries and how the media and Hollywood portray them.
Ironically, Stone used her image in his documentary, speaking on the Fox News Channel, when he was highlighting what he viewed as wild and erroneous anti-Chávez rhetoric on American television. What he should have done was research her well-founded charges and information.
“We left Cuba because my parents didn’t want us to be brainwashed,” Ms. Alonso told AIM, “which is what they do in Communist countries, and it’s what they’re now doing in public schools in Venezuela…So you can imagine what—for me it’s hard, but it’s even harder for the generation of my parents and grandparents because they’re going through this a second time.”
Alonso also pointed out in her letter to Penn that he, Penn, has a Jewish father, and that Jews are oppressed in Chávez’s Venezuela. Alonso also asked why he has a “fascination with a government that has overtly stated its hatred against the Jewish community worldwide, to the extent that the State of Israel condemned anti-Semitic attacks in Venezuela? Do you think it’s fair that many Jewish-Venezuelan families have emigrated because the Chávez government robbed their personal files when their temples and offices were under attack in 2008?”
Chávez makes no secret of his ties to Iran and Syria, and his contempt for Israel, saying that “Someday the genocidal state of Israel will be put in its place, in the proper place and hopefully a real democratic state will be born. But it has become the murderous arm of the Yankee empire—who can doubt it?—which threatens all of us.”
You can listen to the entire interview or read the complete transcript here.
Connie Mack Offers a Dose of Sanity
Fortunately, Rep. Connie Mack of Florida was also on the Larry King program, expressing disbelief over Stone and Ventura’s praise of Chávez. Rep. Mack, who sits on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, brought up Chávez’s support for terrorist groups, ties to Iran and Cuba, and drug trafficking. Stone’s reaction was either to deny it or to defend Chávez. Connie Mack offered to show evidence, but Stone was not interested.
Mack’s office provided AIM with a Congressional Research Service report titled “Latin America and the Caribbean: Illicit Drug Trafficking and U.S. Counterdrug Programs” from April 2010, which stated that “As U.S. counternarcotics cooperation with Venezuela has diminished since 2005, Venezuela has become a major transit point for drug flights through the Caribbean—particularly Haiti and the Dominican Republic—into the United States as well as to Europe.”
Mack’s office also produced a press release from 2007 following passage of a bipartisan House resolution “expressing the House of Representatives’ growing concerns over the national security implications regarding Iran’s growing relationships in Latin America.”
As we have seen—and the media are now reporting—Chávez has close ties to Iran and is trying to help spread Iranian influence throughout the region. He also supports the terrorists in Colombia.
In another media appearance, Stone was on Real Time with Bill Maher on HBO, again singing the praises of Chávez. Maher, wanting nobody to think he opposed what the regime in Venezuela is doing, chimed in with the politically-correct statement that “I’m not anti-Hugo Chávez. I believe as you do that we have demonized him.”
But what if he is being demonized for good reason? What else explains his single-minded devotion to spreading the failed ideology of Marxism around the world in the name of anti-Americanism?
Maher went on to say, “I understand what you’re saying about Hugo Chávez, because America always does seem to need an enemy.” He asked Stone why that is, and Stone rambled on about all the terrible things America is supposedly doing in the world, and then added, “Since we became unilateral, since the fall of the Soviet Union, the United States has dictated the terms around the world.”
Except that, in the case of Obama, as Stone himself acknowledges in the film, there seems to be an understanding between the U.S. President and the Venezuelan ruler. Obama has agreed not to do anything to help the cause of freedom in Venezuela. Stone calls that “destabilizing” Venezuela.
If Maher had bothered to take a cursory look at the stories about what is really happening in Venezuela, as reported even by such establishment organs as The Washington Post and The New York Times, he would understand that the people of that country are suffering greatly, and that Chávez is producing that suffering, perhaps deliberately.
Chávez is, in short, a dangerous tyrant who threatens the security of the United States.
Stone is correct that “private media” can sometimes behave irresponsibly, but the private media that should be held to account in this case include a director in Hollywood and a personality on HBO who apologize and even defend an ideology that has throughout history produced only more misery, suffering and death.
But Stone and Maher are apparently too “stoned” on Chávez to see the truth and reality on the ground in Venezuela.
Roger Aronoff is a media analyst with Accuracy in Media, and is the writer/director of Confronting Iraq: Conflict and Hope." He can be contacted at
roger.aronoff@aim.org