(H/t: Hot Air)

Granted, it shouldn’t surprise all and sundry that Oliver Stone is working on something controversial and eye-rolling worthy. But he’s going a little further than usual, even for him, and although it’s not directly related to the pro-life movement, there may be an interesting parallel or point of note (emphasis added in bold):

Director Oliver Stone’s upcoming Showtime documentary miniseries “Secret History of America” promises to put mass murderers such as Stalin and Hitler “in context.”

“Stalin, Hitler, Mao, McCarthy — these people have been vilified pretty thoroughly by history,” Stone told reporters at the Television Critics Association’s semi-annual press tour in Pasadena.

“Stalin has a complete other story,” Stone said. “Not to paint him as a hero, but to tell a more factual representation. He fought the German war machine more than any single person. We can’t judge people as only ‘bad’ or ‘good.’ Hitler is an easy scapegoat throughout history and its been used cheaply. He’s the product of a series of actions. It’s cause and effect … People in America don’t know the connection between WWI and WWII … I’ve been able to walk in Stalin’s shoes and Hitler’s shoes to understand their point of view. We’re going to educate our minds and liberalize them and broaden them. We want to move beyond opinions … Go into the funding of the Nazi party. How many American corporations were involved, from GM through IBM. Hitler is just a man who could have easily been assassinated.”

The controversial director’s 10-part documentary series for Showtime promises to focus on events that “at the time went under-reported, but crucially shaped America’s unique and complex history of the last 60 years.” Subjects in “History” include President Harry Truman’s decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan and the origins of the Cold War with the Soviet Union.

“You cannot approach history unless you have empathy for the person you may hate,” Stone said during the show’s trailer, which promised to put historical villains “in context.” “I don’t want to put out conventional History Channel product where it’s easy to like it.”

“He’s not saying we’re going to come out with a more positive view of Hitler,” emphasized professor Peter Kuznick, the lead writer on the project. “But we’re going to describe him as a historical phenomenon and not just somebody who appeared out of nowhere.”

This is something both nowhere near as shocking or groundbreaking as it might first appear, yet also rather more sinister and illustrative of a deeper problem.

Any decent amateur student of history will tell you that “empathy,” “in context,” or “historical  phenomenon,” are primary requisites for the most basic and fundamental understanding of history. And to say that American’s as a rule tend to be ignorant of many important historical events and processes, is also a rather bland case of obviousness. Your average American probably can’t tell you much about the relationship between WWI and WWII in Germany (maybe a reference to Versailles at most), or the “stab in the back myth” that Hitler took advantage of on his rise to power. If Stone is going to do this “re-imagining” of Hitler well, one would hope he’d talk about interwar economics, politics (the Nazi’s were played off the Socialists by the traditional parties), and German history, including the German Empire, Prussian Nationalism, the unification of Germany, 19th century science including evolution and Darwinism, Race Theory, Romanticism, Hegelian Philosophy of History, and maybe even the French Revolution. It is not stretching a claim in historical circles to use all the above to “put Hitler in context.” And yes, Stalin led most of the fighting in the Second World War. Americans think the Normandy landings were the European battle, while in reality twenty million Russians were dying on the Ost Front.

So Stone is over-hyping his edgy “need to empathize” business. But empathy and sympathy are two very different things, and revisionist historians far to often fall into the latter while trying to re-portray history from a fresh or new angle. It’s not too difficult to put oneself “into Hitler’s shoes” as a dispossesed and disgruntled young German idealist, embittered over Versailles, fed on half-baked race theories, traditional anti-semitism, and steeped in Prussian Nationalism. That’s really all one need do in order to understand Hitler’s “context.” But the danger with Stone’s revisionist vision is that Hitler might emerge a more sympathetic character, the victim of other nations, someone driven to accidentally become a world monster. It’s all well and good to note how the rise of the Nazi party was influenced buy outside forces, but it doesn’t take away from their ultimate responsibility as willful moral agents. Just because America has a sometimes less than stellar record with ethnic minorities, it wouldn’t justify those same minorities having their own kristallnacht.

If there’s one interesting side note on this whole affair that pro-lifers migth want to keep an eye on, it’s the eugenics connection. It’s pretty commonly understood among pro-lifers that a lot of the early abortion advocates (e.g. Margaret Sanger) were also Eugenics proponents at one time or another. People forget that the Eugenics movement was pretty mainstream and popular in some circles in the first half of the 20th century. It was only WWII and the Nazi party taking Eugenics to its inevitable logical conclusion that put a damper on the race/population control enthusiasts back home.

Is Stone going to take a look at that angle? Could be interesting, and it could be either a bad, or actually, a good thing. If Stone’s trying to bring up dark secrets in American history and he choses to highlight the American Eugenics program, it might remind a lot of Americans that Hitler was simply the ultimate extension of an awkward fact in American history.

So here’s hoping. Not that I’m raising my expectations considerably. Hollywood’s ability to come down on the wrong side of issues time and again is rather impressive.