The whitewashing of red Hollywood

Washington Times ^ | 6/2/05

[ambrose]

The whitewashing of red Hollywood

By Scott Galupo

Lucky is the institution that can mythologize its own past.

Like Hollywood, for instance.

Hollywood produces movies about everything -- war, sports, medieval history, space aliens, you name it. Crucially, it also makes movies about itself, which, in the case of the movie industry's infiltration by Soviet-sympathizing communists in the 1930s and '40s, has come in very handy over the years.

Quick: What's your impression of Hollywood at the outset of the Cold War -- the days of the "blacklist" and the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC)? Do words such as "witch hunt" and "paranoia" free-associatively spring to mind?

If so, then Hollywood has done its job. Movies such as "The Majestic" (2001), "Guilty by Suspicion" (1991) and "The Way We Were" (1973) have propagated the myth that Hollywood communists were "liberals in a hurry," naive idealists who were interested only in expanding civil rights, defeating fascism and demanding economic justice.

"It's the left's last great myth," says historian Ronald Radosh, who co-wrote, with his wife, Allis, "Red Star Over Hollywood: The Film Colony's Long Romance With the Left."

The left can no longer rally to executed atomic-secret spies Ethel and Julius Rosenberg -- no one today seriously doubts their guilt.

Nor to Alger Hiss. The same Soviet intercepts that conclusively fingered the Rosenbergs also implicated Mr. Hiss, who was accused of spying for the Soviet Union while working in the State Department.

And they no longer have Spain. It's now clear that, had the country's republican government survived the civil war against fascist Gen. Francisco Franco in the late '30s, it would have done so as one of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin's puppet regimes.

[ken21]

"It's the left's last great myth,"

of the los angeles times and universities.

[satchmodog9]

It backfired and turned them into Martyrs because the left writes the rules, the rulebook and they have the attention of the world with their fair and balanced film making.

[solzhenitsyn]

It's overstatement to call that "the left's last great myth." What about "Conservatives are racist" and "Liberal economic policies are the best way to fight poverty"?

[Archon of the East]

Quick: What's your impression of Hollywood at the outset of the Cold War

"Ayn Rand and Song of Russia"

[NutCrackerBoy]

Pretty good read bump.

[Abcdefg]

Probably not, but it had some Communists producing propaganda for the USSR.

[Blood of Tyrants]

Joe McCarthy was one of this country's greatest heros. God bless him.