Thursday, August 17, 2017

Oliver Stone on Charlottesville: "Deep State" Is "Bigger Problem" Than Trump

From the Hollywood Reporter:
The director spoke about the U.S. political system during a master class at the Sarajevo Film Festival.

Oliver Stone has said in response to the Charlottesville riots that the problem is not President Donald Trump, but "the system" in America...

"You are all trying to get to Trump every day, but there is a bigger problem," the filmmaker said when asked what he thought of President Trump's initial failure to call out white supremacists in his response to the Charlottesville events.

"There is a system [in America], and that system existed before Trump," Stone said. "Putin said this is the fourth [U.S.] president where nothing has changed. There is a deep state, a military industrial security state. ... It is the system that has to be challenged. [Trump] is part of that system."

He reiterated: "It is the system that has to be challenged. That takes work and is never as exciting as talking about some lunatic president.
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3 comments:

  1. He speaketh the truth. But the worst part of it all is that, through income taxes, we are forced to fund our own slavery to that system.

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  2. I agree with many of Stone's points, but I'm not quite sure that I can endorse his conclusion.

    As odious as the deep state is, I see some parallels here with HHH's arguments regarding democracy being worse than monarchy. The deep state is both permanent and parasitic, so its incentives are generally to avoid killing the golden goose, and even to promote economic growth so that it has more to plunder in the future. So there's a rough alignment of interests between the deep state and others who have a stake in continued prosperity, even if a somewhat perverse one.

    Trump, by contrast, is a transient politician. He doesn't really have any incentive to promote policies that safeguard long-term economic health, especially if they're not popular. So he can't be counted on to avoid doing grievous economic harm with short-sighted populist measures. To me, this makes him arguably more dangerous.

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  3. Stone's Putin doc was awesome.

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