Declassified is a television series that I really dislike. It was produced by Ten Worlds Productions on The History Channel that originally aired on November 9, 2004. At first I thought it was odd that the series has a rock soundtrack, but then I discovered that it's also biased and has errors. Most of the episodes are about Communism. The series claims that secret archives have been opened, and now the world can know more about what happened in the past fifty or so years. That's not true because what we get here is just old information, most of which is presented like and twisted into propaganda.
The episode about Mao Zedong presents Mao as a brilliant tactician who ruled a billion people. It surprised me that more emphasis was not put on the fact that 30 million Chinese starved to death because of the Great Leap Forward. Mao was not all bad (he did after all transform China from a pushover into a great power), but why portray Mao in a much better way than Joseph Stalin. Stalin, it's claimed in the series, is the greatest mass murderer in history. This is untrue, and anyone who studied Stalin in detail instead of watching anti-Soviet documentaries knows this. Stalin's critics purposefully exaggerate the number of people killed by his regime to unbelievable levels. This tells me one thing: they don't care about the dead, and they do this for political reasons. The Russians defeated Nazi Germany's genocidal regime and suffered 27 million deaths in the process, but now America and the West are trying to paint the USSR as being worse than Nazi Germany. They present Stalin as some sort of genocidal maniac who wanted to kill as many people as possible, but the reality is that the several million deaths were due to political repression and rapid industrialization. The series claims that Stalin had a diabolical plan to start a war against the West, and that he killed more Jews than Hitler. This is just plain false. In the end, a stab is taken at the second president of the Russian Federation, Vladimir Putin. What does Putin have to do with Stalin, a man who died 60 years ago? This is just unprofessional. Guess who was interviewed in this episode. Brezinski (the man who created and helped fund the Taliban in the 1980s) and Rice (the woman who helped organize the American invasion of Iraq), two well-known Stalin haters. Oh well, at least Khruschev's son is interviewed too (but I found out that some of what he said was cut out of this so-called documentary). If you want accurate documentary information then turn to CNN's Cold War (1998) series or Thames Television's The World At War (1973) series. Even that A&E program about Hitler and Stalin is better than what John Kosh put together here. But this documentary, with a Neo-Con point-of-view, doesn't just tackle Communism. It also tackles other topics with supposed left-wing connections, like John Lennon, Fidel Castro, World War I, American extremists, the Afghan war, the Berlin Wall, Tiananmen Square etc. This is McCarthyism all over again. The episode about the Taliban is again biased against the Russians. Russians are shown as aggressors, and it's said that Russian soldiers killed many in Afghanistan. OK, a million Afghans were killed, 100,000 of them were Mujahideen. In Vietnam Americans killed about 3 million people, and in Korea they killed about 2 million people. It's clear that Kosh had an agenda here, and he definitely took the chance to point out his views in this series. Once Bush's "War or Terror" got under way his adiministration got Hollywood to do their bidding. Plenty of pro-American, anti-Communist, anti-Islamist films and documentaries have been released since 2001. The West's military alliance NATO is acting against the Russian Federation (backing anti-Russian regimes in countries bordering Russia and installing missile bases in Eastern Europe). They paint president Vladimir Putin as another Joseph Stalin, a man who supposedly opposes Western domination. Anyway, I made my point and any reasonable person will understand it. If you're looking for trustworthy information then find a quality documentary or a history book instead of this piece of Neo-Conservative propaganda called Declassified.
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