For bonus points: where is she and what is she doing?
Posted on 02/10/2003 6:32:47 AM PST by veronica
The response of the left’s Hollywood pack to Bush’s war on terrorism and his preparations for war against Saddam stirred me into reflecting on the disgusting treatment they handed out to Elia Kazan. Kazan had committed the unforgivable sin of revealing the names of Hollywood Stalinists, people who had worked to introduce the wonderful benefits of the Gulag to the American public.
I do not know a single person who has not heard of Senator McCarthy and the Hollywood blacklist, even though he had nothing to do with it. The mere mention of McCarthy’s name at any one of Hollywood’s progressive parties is sufficient to cause mass vomiting, though not the names of Stalin or Castro.
But mention the little matter of the Hollywood left-wing blacklist — the one the American mainstream media suppressed — and you will be met with disbelieving stares. Those who were on this list were anti-communists who suffered for their beliefs because they had the courage to identify Stalinist toadies. Morrie Ryskind was one such person. He was an award-winning film writer until he told a congressional committee the truth about Stalinists in the film industry. Suddenly he was unemployable.
The situation is not much different now. Not in the sense that an actual blacklist exists but through peer group pressure and the fear that if one’s Republican (fascist in Hollywood) sympathies were made known one’s career prospects would quickly come to a halt. Of course, the situation may not be anywhere as bad as this, though the film critic John McDonough has stated otherwise. Nevertheless, an atmosphere of fear and intimidation exists.
Even well-established stars fear to publicly express patriotic or — even worse — pro-Bush sentiments. The pressure to conform to Hollywood’s leftwing groupthink, epitomized by that self-appointed political commissar Barbra Streisand, is immense and menacing and is transformed, as if on cue, quickly into groupspeak.
And who are the enforcers? Displaced personalities totally disconnected from economic and political reality: people for whom politics is nothing more than a politically correct script, a substitute for thinking. For these people there are only two types of Republicans: stupid ones and evil ones.
But why would so many Hollywood luminaries permit this situation to develop? Their attitude to the American Communist Party (CPUSA) certainly helps explain their behavior. The left assiduously cultivated the myth that the CPUSA was never a threat in anyway to the US and that all those associated with it were honest people motivated only by idealism and a love of freedom.
It follows from this that it is absurd and slanderous to suggest that communists and fellow travelers would use their positions in Hollywood to promote communism. But the collapse of the Soviet empire and the subsequent opening of some the KGB’s archives has revealed the real story, the one the Left and the mainstream media has ignored. The evidence is indisputable: the CPUSA was fully controlled and financed by the Soviets. It was nothing more than a sycophantic branch of the CPSU (Communist Party of the Soviet Union).
One might say that that is all history, water under the bridge and all that. And it is certainly the kind of thing Billy Crystal or Richard Dreyfus, both of whom defended those Hollywood activists who happily took their marching orders from Stalin, with Dreyfus going so far as to even libel Kazan, might say.
But anyone who thinks in terms of bygones are bygones has no idea of the Left’s capacity for hatred and revenge, especially the Hollywood Left and its fellow traveling media allies. (Incidentally, several years ago two young left-wing writers on the Sony Studio Lot got Robert Montgomery’s name taken off a building because he had been a “friendly witness” to HUAC. It was an act of political vindictiveness that neither Dreyfus nor Crystal publicly objected to).
This was made sickeningly clear when the Hollywood Left blocked the distinguished director Elia Kazan’s nomination by colleagues for the lifetime achievement award given each year by the American Film Institute and the Los Angeles Film Critics Association.
Kazan who had directed such masterpieces as On the Waterfront, East of Eden and A Streetcar Named Desire and who had won two Oscars as a director was ignored in favor of the left-wing Norman Corman who won lasting fame for The Monster from the Ocean Floor, Attack of the Crab Monsters, Teenage Cave Man, Swamp Women and other cinematic classics.
Kazan’s crime was to have truthfully told the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1952 that he and eight of his friends had been members of the communist party, from which he had resigned in disgust. Some of these men later admitted that Kazan had told the truth. Nevertheless, Kazan and not the Stalinists was turned into a political leper, demonstrating just where the sympathies of Hollywood’s politically correct really lie.
So heavy was the stench of hypocrisy that even The New York Times felt impelled to comment adversely on Hollywood’s vindictiveness. Now the same leftists are attacking Bush. Why aren’t I surprised?
Although I have taken a broad bush to Hollywood I should make it clear that not all Hollywood leftists harbored bitter feelings toward Kazan. I noticed that when Kazan finally received his lifetime achievement award Warren Beatty enthusiastically applauded him. Edd Harris and Nick Nolte's response consisted of folded arms and venomous stares. Some how there was a certain sadness there, not that they would understand my meaning.
For bonus points: where is she and what is she doing?
All of whom were (and are) too dimwitted to realize that under a Stalinist style regime they would stop being pampered, overpaid celebrities and become carefully controlled servants of the state.
Of course, there are plenty of FReepers who would agree with the above sentence if it were written: For these people there are only two types of Democrats: stupid ones and evil ones. And of course the reply to this post will be "But we're right!" :-)
:)
Ron Silver
Pro GWBush's war on terror! Good for you Ron!!! And V, ever see his movie "Enemies, a Love Story?" Is a good one set in the NYC of of the late 1940's.
"The mills of God grind slowly, but they grind exceedingly fine."
Elia Kazan was Warren Beatty's mentor. It was the Kazan movie "Splendor in the Grass" that really put Beatty on the map. It would have been beneath contempt for Beatty to have done otherwise, but many Hollywood Lefties would not have been generous in a moment like that. If I recall correctly, Rod Steiger ("On The Waterfront") was still ranting against Kazan at the time of Oscars.
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