Hollywood Traitors Supported Hitler and Stalin: An Interview with Allan Ryskind

The Daily Caller ^ | May, 13, 2015 | Brett M. Decker

[TigerTown]

Hard-core Communists in Hollywood, and by that I mean those with party cards and whose allegiance was to Joseph Stalin and the Soviet Union, not the United States, made a major effort to take over the movie industry and nearly succeeded. The much-maligned House Un-American Activities Committee, as even liberal Hollywood historians Larry Ceplair and Steven Englund acknowledge, uncovered over 200 party members in Hollywood. My dad, Morrie Ryskind, one of the few outspoken anti-Communist screenwriters in Hollywood, said the number was closer to 300. They were part of a broad conspiracy of subversives who had penetrated America’s most critical institutions, including our intelligence agencies, the State Department and even the White House.

Hollywood continues to celebrate the most ardent Stalinists as champions of our civil liberties. It will do so again this year by releasing a film featuring Bryan Cranston, the star of Breaking Bad, that honors Dalton Trumbo, a major Stalinist screenwriter, as a great defender of our Constitution. It also promises to go after important anti-Communists, like labor leader Roy Brewer and actor John Wayne.

By 1944, the American Communists, who viewed the murderous Joseph Stalin as their political leader, were deeply imbedded in the Hollywood guilds and unions, and even appeared to control movie content.

[greene66]

Another one from that same year was “Force of Evil,” with John Garfield, which pretty much expressed the subtext that organized crime and capitalism were soulmates. That film always annoyed me.

However, although we’re all pointing out some of these examples of leftist thinking inserted into Hollywood scripts, it is true that the vast, overwhelming majority of 1930s/40s film fare avoided this kind of thing like the plague. There were roughly 400 films made each year back then, and actually, only a scattered few were really guilty of pro-commie leanings.

[Captain Peter Blood]

Very True.

[Stepan12]

I don't know how much I trust wikipedia, but this article on Igor Gouzenko seems fair. Gouzenko was so terrified of his former employers that he always wore a hood when interviewed for the public.

[boxlunch]

We need to purge and detox our universities, for the lies they are teaching our kids (and the future public school teachers). The indoctrination going on these days is breathtaking, and apart from cleaning up that mess, any political gains we might make will be temporary.

[zot]

Thanks for the commies in Hollywood ping.

[cherry]

my mother always had a sense of things.....she was clearly a Kennedy Catholic...but she said that the McCarthy hearings were absolutely correct....

she also said that when new Russian immigrants came into our town, and there were lots of them, they even told my mother that Russia would some day take us over....true believers even then....

[Fedora]

Thanks for the ping!

[billyboy15]

Joe McCarthy was right and he should have a monument in DC to honor him.

[Pelham]

Allan Ryskind bookmark

[Pelham]

Ryskind points out that McCarthy played no role in investigating Hollywood:

“Despite a mountain of misinformation that is now considered “history,” McCarthy played no role whatsoever in Hollywood. The House Un-American Activities Committee began its first major investigation of the red influence in Hollywood in 1947, and the vast majority of what the public learned about Hollywood and the Communist influence there stems from that investigation.

“The movie industry, in the wake of the hearings, felt impelled to institute the blacklist to convince the public that Hollywood was not “soft on communism.” The producers laid down the law that the studios would not hire anyone who was a party member and who refused to cooperate with the committee. None of this, however, had anything to do with McCarthy, who was a senator, not a House member, and didn’t even begin his anti-Communist crusade until 1950.”