Communist Propaganda

Rating: Null/10 (7 April 1999)

While I'm not ready to dismiss all conspiracy theories related to the assassination of the 35th President of the United States, I find this one, and others like it to be an outrageous piece of communist propaganda, in fact, one of the most blatantly distorted views of the world in film history, right up there with "Birth of a Nation"(1915)," Triumph of the Will(1935)," "I Am Cuba(1964)," and "The People's War in Laos(1971)." The idea that Kennedy wanted to give up the war in Vietnam, and the so-called "evidence" that Oliver Stone uses to back that notion up is loaded with holes.
For one thing, the TV news footage at the beginning, where Kennedy says..."it's their war," also included him standing by his commitment to defend South Vietnam, and the rest of Southeast Asia from the threat of communism, which was deliberately left out. What he also ignores is the fact that Kennedy only pulled a small number of troops out in 1963, in order to scare the scare Ngo Dinh Diem out of his own repression, and not because he wanted to turn the region over to the reds. Like most presidents during the cold war, he knew that North Vietnam wasn't only a threat to the south, but to Laos & Cambodia as well. Otherwise they never would've armed the Pathet Lao & Khmer Rouge, which proves that THIS WAS NOT A CIVIL WAR.
In an interview in some magazine, Oliver Stone claimed that if Kennedy had never been shot, "The Massacre in Southeast Asia would never have happened." Sorry, Ollie, But it would've happened no matter who was president, because the USSR, Red China, and North Vietnam all made it happen.