By Oliver Stone
Oscar-winning film director Oliver Stone addressed the Znanie Youth Forum in Moscow for the 80th anniversary of Victory Day for the Allies in World War II.
Transcript of speech:
I cannot limit my perspective today to movies. I love movies, but I love history even more, and this year 2025 is, I pray, a real turning point in our history of the world. The defining event of my lifetime has been World War II. Although I wasn’t born until1946, I am very much a child of war and of divorce and of, finally, history.
History is a convergence of many rivers into a bigger and bigger river until it becomes an ocean, and then we see how important the rivers are. We call that history.
My mother was a French girl. My father was an American officer in World War II. They met in Paris in late ’44. They married in ’45. The Lieutenant Colonel took her back to America, to the dream of New York City and all its splendour and power, in 1946. The greatest country on Earth, the most amount of money, the greatest opportunity and privilege – I was born into that. Imagine. And what is it today? Well, you could argue that America has truly squandered that power with needless militarism, investment in endless wars without consideration for the welfare of its own citizenry from the apex of ’46 to the degeneracy of 2025. New York City could be seen as a rotting carcass of greed and power, politics, an oligarchy of corruption. Yet inside it – I do not give up – is a beating heart of hope. Hope, yes, in AI, in artificial intelligence – I believe in it – in good use of technology, yes, and certainly, above all, in human intelligence and compassion.
When I was a kid, I often dreamed of some supercomputer, which seems to be buildable now, that would gather all the possibilities of strategies, moves, and what history has taught us, and sum it all up so that we could always make historically the best decisions. But that’s impossible, because obviously, the input would come from people who actively work at controlling the mindset of our population, so it’s never done in the public interest. The Socrates concept, of course, just doesn’t work, because they always kill the Socrates. They kill or discredit people who don’t care about private gain and just think about the good of the common people. Those people are considered nutcases or dangerous to the public good, and therefore, they’re removed.
My generation sadly never stepped forward. I didn’t do my job. I never became more than a filmmaker, but I wish I had, in hindsight. My contemporary Bill Clinton was the great appeaser who tried to make everybody happy, but he ended up painfully selling out, changing the Democratic Party forever. A great appeaser, yet he pushed NATO East, began that process of betraying the promises made by Baker and Bush to Gorbachev. Not one inch to the East — and we went East, right into the heart of Russia in the form of Ukraine. Started with Clinton, it magnified under George W. Bush, who took us into a War on Terror that never ended – it’s still going on.
A state of emergency has been declared our mantra, and, in its name, the state can do anything it wants, including changing the laws at will, arresting, in the name of security, anybody and anything that crosses the line of what is considered political correctness. George Bush took us onto a road of unnecessary militarism with his wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and ultimately, the greatest war of all – the war he declared on Terror, which is still going on today, as we move on bombing, bombing, bombing, from Yugoslavia in ’99 to Sudan and Yemen and the so-called “lesser folk” who we consider dangerous to our world order.
So, we bring a great waste of our resources, and the height of this futility was the war which Mr. Biden recently dedicated to “weakening Russia.” This was the war in Ukraine. We used a retrograde war. These last three years have been harrowing to me in the West. I’ve learned the propaganda state in the West is an incredible Empire, far bigger and stronger than I ever imagined. We are unable to see from the inside of the Matrix the lies that have enveloped us, that Russia and China and Iran and so forth are our mortal enemies. This isn’t true, but we have succumbed to that, because our media, the networks, the elitist East Coast media, have told us repeatedly, inventing lies about our enemies, like the worst of George Orwell. Imbecilic accusations against Mr. Putin and his Russia.
In the old days, even in the worst of the Cold War, we never referred to Russia as “Khrushchev” or “Brezhnev.” That’s what we’re doing now. We call Russia “Putin,” because Putin, for whatever reason, has been personalized. This isn’t policy. This is a tragic substitution of hatred for intelligence. As a result, we have to relive 1946-1962 cycle again until Kennedy and Khrushchev began the process of change. I want to emphasize to you students how very close we have been to WW3 because of the awful leadership we experienced under Biden and his advisers, such as Anthony Blinken and Jake Sullivan. We survived, which bring us now to Mr. Trump, who has been depicted time and again in our media as a tyrant and a disaster.
These people have allowed their personal hatred for Mr. Trump to destroy their common sense. In his first term of 2016, they were the ones who undermined him right away with false and ridiculous charges of being “Putin’s boy,” because he questioned the key narrative that Russia is our enemy. John Brennan of the CIA was, I believe, the key instigator of this poison at the heart of the insurrection, abetted by Hilary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee, certainly Obama, who know better and betrayed his intelligence, Biden, the worn out old Cold Warrior, the other intelligence agencies, and people in Congress such as Nancy Pelosi, Adam Schiff, and Chuck Schumer.
It didn’t matter to these people or their Democratic supporters that their position against Trump drove us into a full-out engagement against Russia by 2022, not only financing but aiding it with increasing military equipment, our battlefield intelligence, and finally, our management, as reported most recently in the anti Russian New York Times. It was a pure proxy war without our real troops, and the only reason this unholy alliance was defeated was the strength of the Russian resistance and the intrinsic arrogance of the Ukrainian military that, by 2024 and 2025, was now asserting control and taking their own advice – anyway, that’s the story the intelligence agencies’ spooks are telling us. It’s quite possibly true.
The Ukrainian arrogance is certainly displayed in President Zelenskyy’s melodramatic demands for World War against the Russian “invader,” “a crusade against Russia in the name of Western democracy and freedom.” How crazy, how nuts – and here we were, all lining up like happy, patriotic idiots to fight the new Hitler, who we call Putin.
It was the most frightening circumstance for those people, like me, who were praying for sanity, please. Why is the America of not-so-long-ago 1992 suddenly leading a crusade with an old, demented President Biden against the most powerfully armed and dedicated nation we ever faced? And on top of that, talking ourselves up at the same time into taking on the Chinese nation, either simultaneously or right after. Wow. A real-World War III. How proud, how zealous we became in our war fever!
You know, I’ve seen this zealousness again and again, in the books that are here to teach us students – you and me – about World War I (and further back in time to the Crusades of the Medieval Ages on behalf of Christianity). I’ve seen it close-up in my lifetime in Vietnam and again in the first Iraq War – oh, how excited we were after so many years of Vietnam defeatism to watch those mighty bombs and rockets dropping on Baghdad in the dark night, lighting up a world of new American dominance. It was horrifying, if you were sane and knew the real facts behind the war – and, for that matter, behind the 9/11 charade. None of which will stand up to the true light of history, provided we keep that counter-narrative alive in our unofficial press.
So important for you students to recognize that. We need a counter-narrative, remember that, to the false history they teach us in the American Propaganda Empire. And, by the way, that Iraq War the US won in 1991 was followed not-too long after by the Second Iraq War from 2003-2011, which was incredibly messy and stupid, perpetrated by an American Administration led by the idiot son of George Bush and his gang of Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and a dozen other neoconservative fascists out to light the world on fire.
Oh God, they almost succeeded, but, as Shakespeare would have said, “they were hoist by their own petard,” destroyed by their own stupidity and incompetence in ruling both Baghdad and Washington, both of which they ruined. The worst Administration I’ve seen in my lifetime. Of course, add the mess they made in Libya, Syria, and Eastern Africa, and earlier in the Balkans, but we don’t have time for that here.
The only time in my life that I feared for our world even more than living in those Iraq years of chaos was just a few years later when our Biden Administration stumbled into this latest misadventure in Ukraine, of all places. Of course it would be in the heart of Eastern Europe, and it would be the demolition of what we feared as the new Russian Empire that we said wanted to control the world. But who wanted to “control the world,” really? And said it without saying it many times, again and again – it was the USA (with, of course, its proxy NATO, the EU, and so forth).
And here we were, just 10 years after the Iraq debacle was over, rushing into Ukraine as if to forget the folly of Iraq and Afghanistan. This time we were smart – it was without our direct presence of NATO troops, except of course as trainers, strategists, and weapons handlers, everything short of fighting itself. And it was, finally, a giant Ukrainian Army that we put into the field by 2016, and by 2024, eight years later, they came back decimated. As in Vietnam. As in Afghanistan. As in every American intervention.
Trump, in his first term, sent offensive weapons to Ukraine. We pray, in his second, that he’s learned the truth behind our motives – and is mature enough to resist it. For this, he’s hated by a Democratic population that can’t forgive him, even if it means, as it did under Joe Biden, WWIII – that’s how crazy the so-called liberals have become – and thus drove many people like me away from their party.
So, in the unlikeliest person of Donald Trump, a real estate hustler from my hometown New York, history has taken another U-turn. Can Trump, with Putin at his side, turn the tables on all the snide intelligentsia of Washington and Europe and give us a peace that will work? It’s been almost 80 years now that I’ve been on Earth, and guess what? I believe, and I will go on believing – why not? – that there is a possibility of peace. Kennedy talked about it, and Gorbachev talked about it, and even Reagan said, “Why not?” But this is true – this is a moment that we can realize the dream.
Keep in mind that Bush tore up the ABM Treaty in 2002. Trump the INF (Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces) Treaty, and the START Treaty is now in jeopardy. Now is the time. We can turn this all around. What if Trump and Putin actually get together and, trying to solve Ukraine, suddenly agree that we have much bigger fish to fry than this? Hey, what if we took nuclear weapons off the tables? A treaty between us to start destroying arsenal nukes, 10 %, 15 %, 20 % at a time year by year with complete inspections in both countries.
The world would be shocked that the much-ridiculed figure of Trump ended up trumping all of them and turning this whole thing around on its head and becoming one of the most revered leaders of all time (Donald, are you listening?). It would be shocking, wouldn’t it, to admit that he was effective in the end, and he had a meaning in his life, a real meaning? Bringing the peace that John Kennedy dreamed of, and Franklin Roosevelt dreamed of, and Abe Lincoln, too, in his lifetime, and before that, so many others who have been for peace.
I think now is the time. Of course, there are all these problems. What about China? What would they do? And Israel, of course – they do what they want. They don’t pay attention to anybody else. They control American policy, they say. There’s France, and of course Britain, the war dog, has been an aggressor for centuries now and a particular enemy of Russia. India and Pakistan? Impossible. So, all these things – these are gigantic impossibilities, but one baby step at a time. One first move, one classic agreement between Russia and the United States, and the rest becomes easier, believe me.
“We all breathe the same air,” John Kennedy said in June 1963 before closing out his life. “…We all inhabit this small planet…We all cherish our children’s futures. And we are all mortal.” These great words, spoken without notice by Kennedy at American University, ring truer than ever to me. Please, let us put the power of good over the power of evil. Let us conquer the beast in ourselves. It can be done. Thank you.
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