In the last twelve months, amidst the war on terror, we have seen a series of minor battles involving governments, journalists and documentary-makers. Some have questioned the impartiality of news crews, forced to 'shadow' the movements of military units during the invasion of Iraq; whilst others have claimed that the rescue of the soldier Jessica Lynch and the toppling of Saddam's statue in Baghdad - both iconic moments of the War - may have actually been stage-managed for the cameras. (1) As further indication that journalists and documentary-makers now have to watch their backs, we need look no further than the cancelled screening of Oliver Stone's HBO documentary on Fidel Castro. (2) Yet before Stone fans such as myself stand up and scream "Censorship!" we need to consider the possibility that HBO may have be right. After all, Stone has described Castro as "one of the earth's wisest people" (3) - a judgement with which some people might reasonably disagree. Furthermore, a BBC documentary recently used a sophisticated computer simulation to disprove Stone's JKF assassination theory, leading respected journalist Gavin Esler to proclaim: "there is the spectacularly nutty theory of the film-maker Oliver Stone that Kennedy was really murdered by a secretive right-wing cabal in order to put Lyndon Johnson into power. I would love, of course, to be able to prove that some or indeed all of the conspiracy stories are true. But, as we report in The Kennedy Assassination: Beyond Conspiracy there is no factual basis to believe any of the conspiracy theories at all." (4)

In this article, I shall examine the controversy surrounding Stone's role as a "historical filmmaker", arguing that we need to think carefully about what the terms 'impartiality' and 'truth' really mean before we start to lambaste filmmakers for producing outlandish, seemingly eccentric and personal versions of historical events. To do this, we need to go back to the philosophical roots of the Western ideal of knowledge; back to the writings of the great - and I use this term with no small amount of provocation - totalitarian: Plato.

In Book Ten of The Republic, Plato launches his infamous attack on the arts, especially poetry: "It is said that a good poet must understand the issues he writes about, if his writing is to be successful, and that if he didn't understand them, he wouldn't be able to write about them." (5) The wider project of The Republic is to argue for a society in which individual citizens find the role most suited to their individual talents and then pursue that role for the benefit of everyone. The critic Annas calls this "the Principle of Specialisation". (6) The notion that the poet could become a master of all trades is not only an empirical impossibility for Plato, it would also be unjust. (7) Plato continues: "Does history record that there was any war fought in Homer's time whose success depended on his leadership or advice?" (8) He argues that knowledge gained through observation is second-hand and useless, since the poet could never convincingly put into practice what he has 'learned'. This leads directly to the claim that citizens should be focussed on the true knowledge of what he calls "the Forms" and not get distracted by the ignorance of poets, which Plato claims is "equivalent to someone destroying the more civilized members of a community by presenting ruffians with political power". (9)

To the modern reader, this might appear to be a highly abstract and possibly even irrelevant debate. After all, no one in the West seriously advocates the kind of censorship Plato calls for. But my claim is that we have a modern day Homer in the form of Oliver Stone. Both JFK (1991) and Nixon (1995) have been attacked for misrepresenting as 'facts' the dramatisation of historical events and giving legitimacy to outlandish conspiracy theories and the arguments employed by Stone's critics could almost have been penned by Plato himself. This article aims to show that there is much more at stake here than metaphysics and aesthetics: the contested territory which is slightly obscured from view is, in fact, ethics.

Let us frame the debate. One of Stone's critics, Rosenstone, writes: "history on film does not entirely cut loose from data - not if it is a serious historical film rather than a costume drama… Historical film must be judged not on the level of detail but at the level of argument, metaphor, symbol. It must be judged against what we know that can be verified, documented, or reasonably argued" (10) [Rosenstone's italics]. Rosenstone accepts that some distortion of the original events is necessary to produce a coherent work, but believes that artists do not - nor should they - have free reign to produce whatever version of history they personally prefer.

In response to such criticisms, Stone writes: "Rosenstone, in calling me a deductive thinker, claims that 'Oliver Stone wants the details to fit his thesis.' Yet I consider myself, above all, an inductive thinker whose ideas have evolved from the experience of living as fully as I can." (11) Stone believes that we have no direct access to historical events, all versions of history are flawed, and that when it comes to writing history the ethical considerations are at least as important as the epistemological ones. So, in response to Rosenstone's claim that the historical film must be judged against what "can be verified, documented, or reasonably argued", we might well ask: verified by whom? We are faced with the exact same problems of legitimacy Lyotard addressed in his book The Postmodern Condition. (12) With no ideal of true knowledge to refer to (such as the Theory of Forms) we are left in the strange and untenable position of sifting through historical documents with nothing outside them to determine their value, yet still believing that the truth is 'in' them, waiting to be found.

For postmodern thinkers such as Stone and Lyotard, the artist does not seek to mirror the world, as much as he or she seeks, instead, to mirror their subjective interpretation of the world. The problem is not with the artist (who does not believe in an authoritative 'version' of the world), but rather with those who - usually for political reasons - seek to claim that their version is authoritative. Believing, for example, that the memoirs of Henry Kissinger are unreliable, Stone complains: "I have come to believe that much of what we hear of history is the elitist 'official version'." (13) So when we hear the British Government, after the publication of the Hutton Report, reassuring us that the BBC will remain independent and impartial, we must wonder what this actually means in practice. (14)

Stone is not suggesting that the artist who engages with history should be free to claim anything, no matter how outlandish. He places importance on artistic sincerity, arguing that straightforward historical writings, by contrast, are often distorted by hidden agendas and ideology. (15) An objection to this postmodern view of history is that in losing sight of the truth, we inadvertently allow those who wish to deny, for instance, the existence of the Holocaust to do so. For Stone, who considers himself a sincere artist and an inductive and "commonsense" thinker, it is important that we question the motives of Holocaust deniers. The true value in reflecting on the terror of the Holocaust lies not in its actual truth, but in its moral lesson. So, it might be said, that the sincere artist does indeed seek to mirror the world. The mirror, however, operates along the twinned principles of inductive logic and ethical sincerity. Plato's response to this line of argument would be that the artist could not proceed ethically without first knowing the Form of the Good. So, as we can see, the hidden metaphysical ideology behind the two positions does not stay hidden for long.

As I pointed out, the larger project of The Republic is a political one. It would be ignorant to respond to Plato's aesthetics without addressing that fact. Gray writes: "In the world of Homer, there was no morality. There were surely ideas of right and wrong. But there was no idea of a set of rules that everyone must follow, or of a special, super-potent kind of value that defeats all others". (16) It sounds very much like our own era in which the Forms have vanished and, according to thinkers such as Nietzsche, God has died. The concept of truth - when conceived as a mirroring of the world - is a powerful tool. To give historians, politicians and especially 'Philosopher Kings' a monopoly on it (at the expense of artists) is to run the risk of giving them a dangerous monopoly on ethics at the same time.

Endnotes

1. For doubts regarding Lynch, go to: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/3262529.stm ; whilst for evidence supporting the conclusion that the toppling of Saddam's statue was stage-managed, go to: http://www.wsws.org/articles/2003/apr2003/fird-a12.shtml

2. http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/04/17/entertainment/main549870.shtml

3. http://www.indiewire.com/biz/biz_030418comand.html

4. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/3226908.stm

5. Plato, The Republic, Oxford University Press (Oxford, 1994), 598e

6. Annas, J. An Introduction To Plato's Republic, Oxford University Press (Oxford, 1981), p.73

7. Plato, Op Cit 370b-c

8. Ibid 600a

9. Ibid 605b

10. Rosenstone, R.A. 'Oliver Stone As Historian' in Oliver Stone's USA: Film, History, and Controversy, edited by Robert Brent Toplin, University Press of Kansas (Lawrence, 2000), p.34

11. Stone, O. 'Stone on Stone's Image' in Oliver Stone's USA: Film, History, and Controversy, edited by Robert Brent Toplin, University Press of Kansas (Lawrence, 2000), p.57
12. Lyotard, J-F. The Postmodern Condition, Manchester University Press (Manchester, 1986), p.37

13. Stone, Op Cit p.47

14. http://media.guardian.co.uk/huttoninquiry/story/0,13812,1134851,00.html

15. Stone, Op Cit p.55

16. Gray, J. Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals, Granta Books (London, 2002), p.107

Bibliography

Annas, J. An Introduction To Plato's Republic, Oxford University Press (Oxford, 1981)

Gray, J. Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals, Granta Books (London, 2002)

Lyotard, J-F. The Postmodern Condition, Manchester University Press (Manchester, 1986)

Plato, The Republic, Oxford University Press (Oxford, 1994)

Toplin, R.B. (editor) Oliver Stone's USA: Film, History, and Controversy, University Press of Kansas (Lawrence, 2000)

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