I’d love for you to talk about Rudyard Kipling, who lost his son in World War I.
Kipling forced his young son to go and fight in the First World War. The boy couldn’t see properly. He couldn’t have passed any military board. But Kipling used his influence with the British government of the day, and the generals who knew him well, and said, my son is desperate to fight, you must take him into the army. So the boy went to fight in World War I, died fairly early on. And Kipling never really got over that. He wrote one poem in which said he said,
If any question why we died,
Tell them, because our fathers lied
And in “A Dead Statesman,” he wrote,
I could not dig: I dared not rob:
Therefore I lied to please the mob.
Now all my lies are proved untrue,
And I must face the men I slew.
What tale should serve me here among
Mine angry and defrauded young?
And these beautiful lines are so applicable to Iraq, to Afghanistan, and to numerous other wars that are being fought in the twenty-first century, a hundred years after Kipling wrote those lines.
In your writings, you also cite Joseph Conrad, a Pole living in London.
Joseph Conrad was a great Polish writer who moved to London, learned English as a second language, and became one of its finest practitioners. He was very hostile to Belgian colonialism, and many European ones, but was very soft on the British because they had given him refuge. In his famous novel, Heart of Darkness, which is a description of King Leopold’s horrors in the Congo, he wrote:
They were conquerors, and for that you want only brute force—nothing to boast of, when you have it, since your strength is just an accident arising from the weakness of others. They grabbed what they could get for the sake of what was to be got. It was just robbery with violence, aggravated murder on a great scale, and men going at it blind—as is very proper for those who tackle a darkness. The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much. What redeems it is the idea only.
And when you think about this, it really does apply to what has been going on in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. And what Conrad and Kipling demonstrate is the continuities of history. You know, this is nothing new. It has been going on. And the more people that know that these mistakes were made by previous rulers, the better. They should be learned from—and not repeated. If politicians are only destined to repeat themselves historically, the world has a very sad fate ahead for it.
You quote an Iraqi poem, “On the Bird.”
The history of poetry in Iraq is very interesting. The major poets of Iraq happen to be communists. Most of them were exiled by Saddam Hussein when he first came to power. And then soon, just before the first Iraq war, Saddam Hussein realized that the population was missing them, and he sent a message to all three of them, who were in different exiles, and said, why don’t you come and give one big poetry reading in Baghdad? There will be a million people to listen to you. The Iraqi ambassador went to London and said this to Saadi Youssef, the greatest amongst them. And Saadi Youssef asked, who will guarantee our lives? When the ambassador took the message back to Iraq, Saddam Hussein said, tell them the blood on my neck will guarantee their lives. But they said that’s not good enough, and didn’t go. One of them, Mudhafar al-Nawab, who lived in exile in Damascus, wrote this poem:
I have accepted my fate
Is like that of a bird,
And I have endured all
Except humiliation.
Or having my heart
Caged in the Sultan’s palace.
But dear God
Even birds have homes to return to.
I fly across this homeland
From sea to sea,
And to prison after prison, after prison,
Each jailer embracing the other.
A powerful poem.
Yes.
And on that note, thank you so much, Tariq.
About
Oliver
Stone
Nina Subin
Oliver Stone has directed: Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (’10), W. (’08), World Trade Center (‘06), Alexander (’04), Any Given Sunday (’99), U-Turn (’97), Nixon (’95), Natural Born Killers (’94), Heaven and Earth (’93), JFK (’91), The Doors (’91), Born on the Fourth of July (’89), Talk Radio (’88), Wall Street (’87), Platoon (’86), Salvador (’86), The Hand (’81) and Seizure (’73). He’s written or cowritten all of the above, with the exception of U-Turn, World Trade Center, W., and Wall Street: MNS.
He’s also written or cowritten: Midnight Express (’78), Scarface (’83), Conan the Barbarian (’82), Year of the Dragon (’85), Evita (’96), and 8 Million Ways to Die (’86).
He’s directed five documentaries: Looking for Fidel (’04), Comandante (’03), Persona Non Grata (’03), South of the Border (’09), and The Untold History of the United States series for Showtime (’11).
He’s produced or coproduced: The People vs. Larry Flynt (’96), The Joy Luck Club (’93), Reversal of Fortune (’90), Savior (’98), Freeway (’96), South Central (’98), Zebrahead (’92), Blue Steel (’90), and the ABC mini-series Wild Palms (’93). An Emmy was given to him and his coproducer for the HBO film Indictment:The McMartin Trial, and he was nominated for the documentary The Last Days of Kennedy and King.
Stone has won Oscars for directing Born on the Fourth of July and Platoon, and for writing Midnight Express. He was nominated for director (JFK) and cowriter (Nixon). He’s also received three Golden Globes for directing (Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July, and JFK) and one for writing (Midnight Express).
Stone wrote a novel, published in 1997 by St. Martin’s Press, entitled A Child’s Night Dream, based on Stone’s experiences as a young man. He is a contributor of some two hundred pages’ of essays on movies, culture, politics, and history to the book Oliver Stone’s USA, edited by Robert Brent Toplin and published by the University Press of Kansas (2000). Stone wrote the afterword for a book of scholarly essays analyzing his film Alexander called “Oliver Stone’s Alexander: Film, History, and Cultural Studies” (2009).
Stone was born September 15, 1946, in New York, New York. Prior to his film career, Stone worked as a schoolteacher in Vietnam, a taxi driver, messenger, production assistant, and sales representative. He served in the US Army Infantry in Vietnam in 1967–68. He was wounded twice and decorated with the Bronze Star for Valor. After returning from Vietnam, he completed his undergraduate studies at New York University Film School in 1971.
About
Tariq
Ali
James Porto
Tariq Ali is a writer and filmmaker. He has written more than two dozen books on world history and politics, and seven novels (translated into over a dozen languages) as well as scripts for the stage and screen. He is an editor of New Left Review and lives in London. His website is http://tariqali.org.
On History: Tariq Ali and Oliver Stone in Conversation Page 9