Stone's 'Putin Interviews' Offends Liberal America

Academic and author, Tim Anderson, joins John to dissect the response to Oliver Stone's documentary series on Vladimir Putin. It is a response that lays bare the sense of exceptionalism that has so distorted liberal America's sense of itself and its place in the world.

To its adherents, the United States is truly the one indispensable nation, that shining city on a hill, despite the country's long and sordid history of international banditry, subversion, and aggression proving otherwise.

Stone, a man who's spent his entire career in film exposing the inconvenient truths of this history, has been pilloried in the US for this his latest series of documentaries on a leader who refuses to accept Washington's writ. Putin, like Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro before him, has been depicted as a pantomime villain in the West for precisely this refusal to kowtow.

On this episode John and Tim take a scalpel to the ineffable ignorance and shallow consciousness that pervades in the gilded temples of the mainstream media in the US, locating it as part of the architecture of cultural imperialism that has over time proved every bit as effective as cruise missiles, F-16s, and Kevlar-helmeted Marines in sustaining the domination and hegemony of one of the most destructive empires the world has ever known.