Writers are traditionally concerned with people. These are the bones of their work. To understand people properly they had to understand the society in which they live and the economic conditions under which they live.So any writer worthy of the name studies the problems. Probably he became a writer because he's a humanitarian. There is at least a streak of altruistic idealism in him. They have become troubled about poverty, especially when there is such a discrepancy; where a man making twenty-five hundred dollars a week is next to a man making twenty-five dollars a week.You hear in Hollywood more than anywhere else the word "break" used. If you ask a successful person in Hollywood how he got there, he will never say, "I got there by hard work and personality." He will say, "I got the breaks." Of course, hard work and personality count a great deal, but "breaks" count, too.
We think, there but for the grace of God, go I, when we somebody not so successful. As a result, a person in Hollywood is really interested in bringing up the general level of the people around him. He knows he can't do it individually. He knows it wouldn't do any good to give five bucks here or there. He looks around for any organization in which he can work that does these things. He finds Marxism because it is waiting for him.
The Communist Party has laid clever fly-traps for him. Those organizations are all around him. Their overt purpose is certainly good. They not only attract those who become Communists, they attract many who never become Communists, but give Communists their time, their work, and their money.
Just another celluloid leftist lie-fest..*this* one,
by Buffoony Clooney.
Senator Joe McCarthy
-and-
the HOUSE Un-American Activities Committee?
I am no student of the early Cold War, but even one so ignorant as I finds it... odd... to see a Senator alleged to be involved in a House committee
Note: The following text is an exact quote:
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Monday, October 10, 2005
EDITING OUT THE FACTS:
George Clooney's Deceptive New Movie 'Good Night, and Good Luck'
By Dr. Tom Snyder, Editor of MOVIEGUIDE®
HOLLYWOOD, CA (ANS) -- There are few facts on display in GOOD NIGHT, AND GOOD LUCK, actor George Clooney's liberal version of CBS-TV news commentator's Edward R. Murrow's 1953 feud Joe McCarthy, the fiercely anti-Communist senator from Wisconsin.
The movie, opening Friday Oct. 7, presents the feud as an emotional battle of political rhetoric, with the loser, of course, being Sen. McCarthy. The real historical facts, however, are not so clear.
GOOD NIGHT, AND GOOD LUCK opens with Murrow giving a speech in the late 1950s warning about the confusion of TV news with entertainment.
Cut to 1953 at the height of Sen. McCarthy's war against Communist and left-wing security risks in the United States government. The newsmen working with Murrow on his SEE IT NOW news commentary show are itching to confront the Senator.
At the height of Sen. McCarthy's campaign warning about potential security risks in the U.S. Army, Murrow does a show about a young lieutenant mustered out of the Army because of the allegedly left-wing activities of two family members. Murrow does another program on McCarthy's own speeches, ending with a strong editorial commentary against Sen. McCarthy and offering to give the senator a whole half hour to respond. McCarthy's response includes an attack on Murrow's own left-leaning political background. The next week, Murrow responds by castigating Sen. McCarthy further and claiming that McCarthy got one of his facts wrong. In the wake of the controversy, Murrow's show loses its sponsor and CBS cancels it, claiming that the show's ratings are not good enough.
Filmed in black and white, GOOD NIGHT, AND GOOD LUCK is well-produced and well-acted. Of course, the movie does not tell viewers that McCarthy had nothing to do with kicking the young lieutenant out of the Army. Nor does the movie show that McCarthy's response to Murrow's attacks included a lot more details about protecting America from Communist infiltration than just questioning of Murrow's own leftist political motives.
Furthermore, in researching this controversy, MOVIEGUIDE® could find no support for Murrow's claim in the movie that McCarthy got one of his facts wrong, namely that, contrary to what McCarthy claimed, Murrow was never a member of a radical, pro-Communist, Marxist union group called the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). In fact, Wikipedia on the Internet lists Murrow as a famous member of the group, but Wikipedia apparently is not always reliable. Be that as it may, MOVIEGUIDE® could not find a second source for the movie Murrow's assertion about Murrow and the IWW.
Thus, GOOD NIGHT, AND GOOD LUCK sticks mainly to the radical liberal, pro-Communist, revisionist version about the controversy surrounding Murrow's programs and Sen. McCarthy. As such, it offers mainly emotional, bombastic arguments and lots of style, but not much substance.
Despite some minor problems with her book, MOVIEGUIDE® recommends people read Ann Coulter's bestseller TREASON instead. It offers a more detailed, better researched and more well-rounded look at Sen. McCarthy's career. Despite Coulter's rhetorical flourishes, her book is a good, informative read. It's easier, however, to have a rational argument supported by many facts in a non-fiction book like TREASON than it is in a 90-minute movie like this.
The new visual medium of TV was not kind to McCarthy's campaign stump style of delivery, but the poor man was repeatedly vilified in the national liberal press, which instigated a Congressional investigation of McCarthy's probe of security risks in the military. Murrow was definitely a better communicator on TV than Sen. McCarthy, but Murrow's tactics, as shown by this movie and tapes of his actual work, are just as emotional and bombastic, if not more so.
I've always been puzzled by the national news media's fascination with these McCarthy programs by Murrow and his team. They show a tendency to editorialize rather than use hard facts and rational arguments, and an inclination to avoid honest debate. Ironically, the same journalists who extol Murrow seem to look down their noses at Bill O'Reilly of Fox News, whose news commentaries and editorials are far more journalistically and factually sound, though perhaps just as bombastic (in their own way), as Murrow's.
We now know, of course, that McCarthy was mostly right – the United States government and many left-leaning organizations in the United States were indeed infiltrated by Communist spies and pro-Communist stooges sponsored and/or supported in one way or another by the Soviet Union. For example, at least one person that Murrow and American liberals defended, Laurence Duggan, was indeed a Communist spy and later worked openly in leftist, Neo-Marxist circles. We also know that a black woman, Annie Lee Moss, working in the Code Room of the Pentagon, whose famous testimony is featured in George Clooney's movie, was indeed a Communist Party member in the mid 1940s. Also, Annie Lee Moss really did receive a DAILY WORKER at her actual address in Washington D.C., despite her demure, intentionally humorous protestations.
It should also be pointed out that McCarthy's usual strategy was not to openly identify someone as a Communist spy or a security risk, because he wanted the government authorities to investigate such matters themselves and decide, one way or another, by legal means, whether a particular person was indeed a Communist spy or a security risk. In fact, in the case of the Army lieutenant mustered out of the Army, the lieutenant's lawyer, working within the law and with the authorities, was able to acquit his client fairly quickly. It is good that the news media brought the man's case to light, but the fact remains, McCarthy had nothing personally to do with the man's case, one way or another! Thus, the liberal, elitist news media tried to use the man's case to conduct its own witch-hunt of Sen. McCarthy and his colleagues and supporters.
Finally, please note that Murrow's reports on McCarthy include little, if any, contrary arguments, facts or interviews from McCarthy or any of McCarthy's strongest supporters. Neither, regrettably, does George Clooney's revisionist movie. That hardly strikes MOVIEGUIDE® as honest filmmaking, much less as objective, fair-minded, fact-finding journalism.
** You may republish this story with proper attribution.
The world has to be reminded of the nature of shame if only to remember that once it made us human.
Communism was and is unsustainable as a model; a world where shame is but a footnote in history books will prove to be unsustainable as well.
This movie is gonna bomb and will hit the $1 K-mart DVD bin.
It wasn't McCarthy’s anti-Communist crusade that brought him down, it was his tactics.
His "tactics" were not helped in the least by the fact that he definitely was not telegenic. The writer says he used police state tactics. Anyone who watched any of the hearings at the time or who has seen film of the hearings will note that witnesses, et al. reeked of contempt for the man -- that's some "police state!"
"Most powerful man in the Senate?" He was hated by the mainstream having been called a Nazi since as a Congressman he was critical of the way U.S. occupying forces were mistreating German regular army prisoners, none of whom were Nazis.
Yes, many if not most of us little people thought he was correct. He was.
1) It's the ''Venona'' project and the ''Venona'' papers, not ''Verona'', which codeword term dates to the 1940s. The release of the KGB's Venona documents in 1994-1996 merely confirmed what every non-Soviet sympathiser knew; there were a shjtpotful of Soviet agents in every European and N. American government...practically none of which have been brought to book even yet today. Possibly because of apologists such as yourself, but who knows for certain, eh?
2) Stalin didn't starve the kulaks (small private landowners/farmers)except some of those in the Ukraine (see below). He simply liquidated the Great Russian and White Russian, and Don kulaks if they refused to surrender their land to the kolkhozi, the so-called collective farms. The people Stalin forcibly starved were the Ukranian people, for numerous reasons, not least of which was the enthusiam of the Ukranians for the German invasion of Russia in WW I, plus their firm loyalty to the Orthodox church. Recommend you see the excellent and brutally accurate documentary film ''Winter of Despair'', made decades ago, and which (of course) the LSM wouldn't dream of allowing the American people to view.
3) Stalin ranks in second place as the greatest mass murderer in history. Mao killed at least 3 of his citizens for every one that Stalin killed (or caused to be killed, same thing net-net-net). Pol Pot, btw, holds the all-time record for the highest percentage of citizens deliberately killed by their government.
By the way, about 15 or 20 years ago I used to regularly watch reruns of "See It Now". I believe they were shown on a PBS station. The shows generally had Murrow interviewing famous people, and a couple of the shows I remember had him interviewing newly elected Senator John F. Kennedy and his bride, and another had Harpo Marx (who, of course, answered questions without speaking).
I watched the shows mostly to see cool snapshots of history, but I wasn't especially impressed by the famous Murrow. He was pretty good, but I suspect that history has hyped him up way beyond what he was.
Here is another example of blatant liberal lies, spins and rewriting of history while ignoring the deaths and misery brought on this world's innocents by the communists.
This obsession with dirtying his name and career is beyond comprehension. God bless Ann Coulter for her book!
How did it look to have a United States Senator attempt to send an erudite 29-year-old to fight his battles for him?
An apologia for Dan Rather.
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