Customer Reviews

The 20th Century: The 1930s: The Great Depression [VHS]

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This video on the 1930s, part of a 10 part series, has got to be the most outrageously inaccurate and biased film I have ever viewed, with the possible exception of Leni Reifenstahl's Nazi propaganda masterpiece, Triumph Of The Will.

For it too is not history but propaganda of the worst sort.

For example, it makes the nonsensical claim that at the time Adolf Hitler became Chancellor in January of 1933, the "President" of the German Republic was Otto von Bismarck (who died in 1898), and NOT the aging WWI military figure Paul von Hindenburg. It even shows an old still of Bismarck while this narration precedes.

The primary focus however, is upon the Great Depression and the New Deal of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. It is here the video is at its worst, presenting as fact the most blatant partisan account of FDR's administration, his Republican predecessors, and the various New Deal agencies.

This section of the video, highlighted by "commentary" by Howard Zinn, goes beyond the most remote objective scholarship of the period, into sheer agit-prop of the Stalinist "Popular Front," lauding the social consciousness of the CPUSA, celebrating domestic Communist heroes John Steinbeck, Paul Robeson, Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, and the Scottsboro Boys, and the Party's efforts to organize the American proletariat under labor's C.I.O.

The balance of the video concentrates on the rise of European fascism, focusing upon Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco.

Stalin is mentioned only in passing, as a confused victim of Hitler's duplicity and manipulation, and as a supporter of the Republican Loyalists in Spain against the above mentioned fascist trio.

No Soviet Gulag, no extermination of Kulaks, no millions systematically starved to death in engineered famines, or murdered as class or political enemies. No Hitler-Stalin Pact, the final culmination of a decade of deadly covert machinations of the Nazis and the Soviets.

For a richer, more accurate historical portrait of the 1930s, see:

Eugene Lyons, The Red Decade;

J. C. Furnas, Stormy Weather: Crosslights on the Nineteen Thirties - An Informal Social History of the United States 1929-1941;

John T. Flynn, The Roosevelt Myth;

Murray N. Rothbard, America's Great Depression;

Robert Conquest, Stalin: Breaker of Nations;

Robert Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow;

Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: A Reassessment;

Edvard Radzinsky, Stalin;

Stephen Koch, Double Lives: Spies and Writers in the Secret Soviet War of Ideas Against the West;

Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev, The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America - The Stalin Years;

Herbert Romerstein and Eric Breindel, The Venona Secrets: Exposing Soviet Espionage and America's Traitors;

John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America;

Kenneth Lloyd Billingsley, Hollywood Party: How Communism Seduced the American Film Industry in the 1930s and 1940s;

Ronald Radosh, Mary R. Habeck, and Grigory Sevostianov, Spain Betrayed: The Soviet Union in the Spanish Civil War;

Iris Chang, The Rape of Nanking;

Yuki Tanaka, Hidden Horrors;

George Seldes, Can These Things Be!

Konrad Heiden, Der Fuehrer;

Michael Burleigh, The Third Reich: A New History;

Charles Higham, Trading With the Enemy: An Expose' of the Nazi-American Money Plot 1933-1949;

Paul Johnson, Modern Times;

Anthony Read and David Fisher, The Deadly Embrace: Hitler, Stalin, and the Nazi-Soviet Pact 1939-1941;

Viktor Suvorov, The Chief Culprit: Stalin's Grand Design to Start World War II;

James B. Edwards, Hitler: Stalin's Stooge: How Stalin Planned To Use Hitler To Conquer Europe;

Patrick J. Buchanan, Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War: How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World.

I am looking for an overview series to introduce high school students to the century, decade-by-decade, as the text book does. This video could serve the purpose although I would prefer a bit less time spent on Bonnie and Clyde or Neville Chamberlain and some of the other longer footages as noted in the first reveiw and a bit more on living conditions, cause and effect. Not that Mr Chamberlain or the gunners of the 30's whern't important aspects of life in that time - the footage, and time, was wasted to some degree by less-than succinct monologue.

I am especially concerned with the Bismark error. Selection of material always reflects a bias of some sort but gross historical errors in a finished documentary are inexcusable. Since this is part of a series and this is the only one of the series I have access to before I spend school money on the series, this error forces me to keep searching.

The great depression has passed almost 70 years,we have lost a lot.We must be careful not to make the same mistake two times.We should be well aware that the 1930 depression is just after the " new technology" . We are now experiencing a new revolution of IT technology.Economic bubbles have come into being readily.NASDAQ is moving up and down dramatically,American is facing a tremendous challenge: how to avoid another depression? can Alan Greenspan save American once again? what policy should be taken except cutting down interest rate and texes?

We can learn a lot from the movie.The policy maker should watch it carefully.I wish that our policy makers will learn something from it.