Posted on 10/13/2005 9:41:15 PM PDT by nunya bidness
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1130164/posts
Fools for Communism Still apologists after all these years (long, some vulgarity)
Reason ^ | May 5, 2004 | Glenn Garvin
Posted on 05/05/2004 1:37:34 PM CDT by neverdem
In Denial: Historians, Communism and Espionage, by John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, San Francisco: Encounter Books, 300 pages, $25.95
The pertinent question is no longer whether Americans spied, but rather how highly educated, intelligent men and women failed to comprehend the true nature of Stalinist communism, and why they were willing to risk their lives and imperil the security of their families, neighbors and friends to commit crimes on behalf of a foreign power opposed to the basic tenets of modern society.
Let me know when this changes....
My letter to Geo. Clooney:
Mr. Clooney:
Having specialized in Russian history as an undergraduate, I am always left with a vague unease at the general ignorance of the period in question, particularly the Soviet role; it's like the recent breakthrough in our knowledge of the Soviet Era over the past decade never took place.
Even with a large (and growing) body of evidence of the absolute horrors of Soviet terror and mass murder, the regime always seems to get a pass with the Hollywood cognoscenti, who seem either poorly informed, willfully ignorant, or both. But mostly I think it is just the effect of years of mythmaking and devotion to the tribal idols, which this film upholds with perfect fidelity. Hell, look around at the reviews, the Hollywood left loved it largely because of their untenable and ahistorical politics, such as they are.
If you want a clearer picture of what the Soviets were, how they operated, and the extent to which they did penetrate the United States at so many levels, I’d recommend any number of important works over the past decade, starting with the Yale series on communism by John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr. Both men have made monumental strides in pulling back the veil on Soviet espionage and why it created a man like Joseph McCarthy. It will also help to understand the most inscrutable aspect of the Cold war: how so many otherwise thoughtful Americans could be so credulous as to the reality of the Soviet Union.
At no time in “Good Night, And Good Luck” is the back story to the McCarthy era presented." The whole "back story" that the film drops is the Soviet Union itself. My problem with this film is that it never seems inclined to address the fact that the fictitious “witches” of the film were actual Soviet spies, saboteurs, propagandists, party-members, and fellow travelers of all sorts (Hiss, by the way, was a Soviet spy, as were the Rosenbergs, and so was Laurence Duggan, Mr. Murrow’s mentor and one of the main reasons Murrow loathed McCarthy. I feel no sympathy for any of them. You may, of course, continue to be one of a slender few people who continue to uphold their innocence, but you may as well believe OJ was framed if you are so inclined).
As far as "blacklisting," the generations of Russian intellectuals (Mandelstam, Babel, Anna Ahkmatova, Pasternak, Alexei Tolstoi, Gorky, Bulgakov, and Prokofiev just to name a small handful) who were tortured, murdered or relentlessly hounded by the very entity that people like John Henry Lawson were defending, would have viewed the HUAC trials a little differently. Also, the “suffering” of Hellman, Hammett, Trumbo, Lawson, et al. was so slight as to almost risible, especially in contrast to the very real persecution of the Soviet intelligentsia. If anything, the “blacklist” gave their case cause celebre status among the leftist industry types who were to rise during the next generation—where it remains decked out in Hollywood tinsel. What a farce! While assholes and liars like Ring Lardner and Lillian Hellman feigned injury, the whole of Eastern Europe was being force to swallow a boot heel, and while the champions of freedom among the American left were rallying to their new icons, the icons were completing a lifelong whitewash of the gulag archipelago. Of course, the real horror of the Soviet Union was known very early on, but with so many western leftists working so hard for the Comintern, it took decades longer than it should have for us to realize the danger.
If Czeslaw Milosz is right to be concerned about "the vulnerability of the twentieth-century mind to seduction by sociopolitical doctrines and its readiness to accept totalitarian terror for the sake of a hypothetical future,” then why shouldn’t we remain perplexed at the unwillingness of Hollywood to at least come to recognize that the people saying that it was OK to be a Communist or say laudable things about the Soviet Union were either nuts or vile or both. No one would be defending the fellow travelers anymore if they were Nazi apologists, so why should people whose guiding ideology (and I mean that in an ironic and pointedly Marxist sense) was so hostile to liberal democracy be treated as mere dissenters? If it is indeed true that McCarthy was reckless and irresponsible, and both Klehr and Haynes argue he was, then when will the movie be made showing that Whittaker Chambers and Elia Kazan were actually right, that the apologists for the Soviet gulag state were abetting mass murder as a political program.
One more thing, HUAC and McCarthy were not the same thing. McCarthy did not emerge until 1950, and in the Senate, but by that time Truman had largely taken care of the problem; McCarthy was grandstanding for partisan purposes, mainly, but as for the substance of his grandstanding, that there really were Reds, he was quite correct.
Regards,
Gio Bruno
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