Oliver Stone and the Left Cannot See a Cup Half Full

Editor’s Note: David Horowitz had a debate with Oliver Stone several years ago in National Scholastic Magazine. Here’s his piece of the debate.

One of the principal sources of human misery is a tendency that exists in all of us to take for granted what we are given, and fail to appreciate what we have. There is even a folk wisdom that makes us aware of this, telling us to be wary of those who see the half empty glass when it is also half full. From the most intimate relations that take place within families to the political battles that determine the fate of nations, this simple error in perspective has been the cause of incalculable human suffering from the beginning of time.

In our century alone, visionaries of the left, rejecting the social order they inherited, murdered a hundred million human beings in pursuit of their impossible dreams. In the name of “social justice” and to “make a better world,” social utopians destroyed the political and economic structures of whole societies that had evolved organically in the course of centuries. What their revolutions produced was not – as they promised — something better than had been, but infinitely worse: a suffering greater than the world had ever seen.

When the revolutionaries seized power in 1917, Russia possessed a democratic parliament and an agricultural economy that produced a surplus for export to countries abroad. But Lenin’s social dreamers viewed Russia as a half-empty cup compared to what they imagined their socialist plans would create. As a result, they didn’t think twice about eviscerating Russia’s economy and decapitating its democracy. They were so confident that on the ruins a future would rise that was better than both. Freed of the restraints of custom and law, the liberators went on to slaughter 40 million “enemies of the people,” who were mostly peasants, and to put tens of millions of those who dissented in concentration camps for the greater good. All this was necessary, they said, to build a “people’s democracy” and a “worker’s state.” But they were able to build no socialist paradise. Instead they produced a world of famine, poverty and human suffering. READ MORE...