|
The
nauseating spectacle of Hollywood celebrities prostrating themselves before
Obama highlights the hypocrisy, ignorance and outright stupidity of these
celluloid intellectuals, of whom George Clooney is a particularly nauseating
example. As Hollywood’s most prominent celluloid intellectual — the equally
imbecilic Ron Howard is a very close second — he probably thought he was
being profound as well as smart when he declared that “We are a little bit
out of touch in Hollywood. I think that’s probably a good thing”. A not
unexpected statement from a man who seems to credit Hollywood with saving
America from fascism and racism.
(These
sanctimonious Hollywood denizens never mention the fact that the Democrats
were the party of slavery, lynching, segregation and Jim Crow).
Just
how tolerant and patriotic is the Hollywood left? Not very if history is
allowed to judge. The vicious attacks on the late and great Elia Kazan by
Hollywood leftists exposed the hypocrisy and totalitarian mindset of those
who George Clooney admires for being “a little bit out of touch” with the
rest of the country. This disgusting treatment revealed the extent of the
left’s malevolent influence in Botox Town and just exactly where its
sympathies really lie. No matter which way you dress them up, the attacks on
Elia Kazan amounted to support for American Stalinists. And this is something
that should not be forgotten, regardless of what the buffoonish Clooney would
have us believe. Something else that should not be forgotten is that most of the
world’s media, meaning leftwing agitators masquerading as journalists, felt
the same way.
For
instance, I can distinctly recall that when I first read that Elia Kazan was
to be awarded a life-time achievement Oscar at the 1999 ceremony I knew
immediately which side the Australian media would join. I regret to say,
events did not confound my prediction. Like Pavlovian dogs Melbourne’s Age and Murdoch’s Australian went in swinging for the
Left. Shane Danielsen’s article (The
Australian 19 March 1999) was especially sickening. (Danielsen is
now the creative consultant for Hopscotch Films. I guess this means he is
paid to make things up). This was not the first cowardly attack launched by The Australian against Elia Kazan. The
so-called Culture Vulture
column (The paper’s Weekend Magazine
19-20 September 1998) called Elia Kazan “odious”. Of course, there
was no criticism of Hollywood Stalinists.
A
photograph of Elia Kazan dominated the page and inset was a photo of
Senator Joe McCarthy. The juxtaposition was grossly misleading and
motivated by malice. Readers were clearly intended to conclude that Elia
Kazan and McCarthy were in some way connected. A totally dishonest
insinuation but just the kind of thing one expects from the diseased left.
Danielsen
asserted that McCarthy had organised the 1952 House Committee on Un-American
Activities. Really? The facts (those little things real journalists report) are to the contrary. At the time
of the HUAC hearings McCarthy was running his own investigation into
communist infiltration of the State Department and the military.
(Incidentally, HUAC was set up in 1938 by Democrats). He had nothing at all
to do with any hearings on communism in the entertainment industry which were
conducted in the House of Representatives. Moreover, these investigations
started in the 1940s and were requested by actors and studio executives,
mainly as a reaction to the Communist Party’s own blacklist, something the
likes of Danielsen and Clooney would never mention.
(This
is one blacklist we never get to hear about. And just in case you think it’s
dead, 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. Needless to say, Clooney and the rest of the
Hollywood left remained unmoved by this act of leftwing bastardry).
So why
did Danielsen assert otherwise? Why did The
Australian libellously portray Elia Kazan as being linked to
McCarthy? Danielsen called Elia Kazan’s “early flirtation with Marxism [as]
puzzling”. This is a disingenuous statement, to put it mildly, considering
that Kazan had been a Party member for 17 years. If this is Danielsen’s idea
of flirting I can only boggle at his definition of courting. In his
autobiography, A Life, Kazan
wrote:
After
seventeen years of watching the Soviet Union turn into an imperialist power,
was that truly what I wanted here in the [US?] Wasn’t what I’d been defending
up until now by my silence a conspiracy working for another country?
Kazan made
it abundantly clear in his book why he acted as he did:
. . .If
you expect an apology now because I would later name names to the House
Committee, you’ve misjudged my character. The ‘horrible, immoral thing’ I
would do, I did out of my true self. Everything before was seventeen years of
posturing. The people who owe you an explanation (no apology expected) are
those who, year after year, held the Soviets blameless for all their crimes.
Given
that Elia Kazan’s autobiography and On the
Waterfront clearly delineated his views what are we to make of
Danielsen’s comments? Readers have a right to expect informed and honest
commentary. Can anyone seriously suggest that Danielsen’s article provided
it. Danielsen went on to claim that “Elia Kazan should have maintained” his
silence and that his actions were a “betrayal”. Of what?
Let
us get several things in order. If the people he ‘betrayed’ had been
unrepentant members of the American Nazi Party and had taken their orders
from Hitler would Elia Kazan be called a traitor for revealing their names?
Not in a zillion years. On the contrary, Hollywood would have hailed him as a
brave and honest man, as would Danielsen. What’s more, Clooney would probably
have produced a film called a Elia Kazan:
A Profile in Courage.
The
same goes if these Stalinists had instead been secret members of the Ku
Klux Klan. What Danielsen and his leftwing ilk conveniently ignored is that
these so-called victims were members of a political party that took its
orders from Stalin and who did everything possible to advance that mass
murderer’s interests. It was their treason that Elia Kazan rebelled against.
(This
is not hyperbole. Willi Munzenberg, later murdered by one of Stalin’s agents,
was Moscow’s propaganda genius in the West. Otto Katz*, alias Rudolph Breda,
was Munzenberg’s agent in Hollywood. Katz worked in close cooperation with
Donald Ogden Stewart, a known Stalinist and one of the Hollywood Ten, i.e.,
one of Richard Dreyfus’ “principled” men). George Clooney Elia Kazan
Richard Dreyfus.
Are
Danielsen, Clooney and the other self-righteous leftists aware of this fact?
Of course they are. Predictably Danielsen resorted to the loathsome practice
of moral equivalence by seriously claiming that “HUAC’s activities were
indistinguishable from the very totalitarianism they professed to despise”. I
emphasised “professed” because the insinuation is that the House Committee
really consisted of totalitarians. (Insinuation, incidentally, is one of the
Left’s favourite methods for smearing opponents).
Are the
likes of Danielsen and Clooney for real? I fear so, is the answer. The
Danielsens of this world have absolutely no problem in equating the crimes of
Russia’s Leninist-Stalinist regime, a regime that murdered millions of its
own citizens, with the behaviour of the House Committee of Un-American
Activities.
I
suggest the likes of Danielsen, including moral cretins like Clooney,
Dreyfus, Ron Howard and Steven Spielberg read, just for starters, The Harvest of Sorrow by Robert Conquest
and then try to argue that there exists here a genuine moral equivalence. The
people that Elia Kazan ‘betrayed’ knew of Stalin’s crimes and yet they still
supported him. And Danielsen had the nerve to pompously state that “Kazan’s
hands are not clean”. It’s time that the miserable likes of Danielsen did a
little hand-washing of their own.
From
where I’m sitting I have no trouble at all in seeing whose hands are soiled —
and I’m not just referring to Hollywood. But let Elia Kazan answer for
himself: “Why should I defend people like this?” Perhaps the likes of Clooney
and lefty mates in the media have the answer, though I doubt it. Those who
can condemn others for revealing the names of Stalinists who worked to
literally enslave their own country lack, putting it mildly, any moral
perspective.
A
curious silence befell the Left and its media mates when Edward Dmytryk gave
his support to the Ad Hoc Committee for Naming Facts and its defence of Elia
Kazan. As director of such Hollywood classics as The Caine Mutiny and The
Young Lions one should have thought his support would have
warranted a reference by Danielsen.
No, not
a word. Was that because Dmytryk was one of the Hollywood Ten who went to
prison, serving the longest term? Is it also because he turned against his
Stalinist colleagues? In an article for The
Saturday Evening Post (19 May 1950) titled What Makes a Hollywood Communist? he
wrote:
The
time has come now when even the fellow traveller must get out. They’re like
the waxy capsule that protects the tubercle — dissolve that waxy covering and
you could kill tuberculosis in no time. I know now that you can’t aid a
Communist front in any way without hurting your own country. The Hiss
conviction, the Judith Coplon trial, they all show that no matter how small a
fraction of the party is guilty of espionage, the responsibility is on the
whole party, and anyone who supports it.
But
judging from Danielsen’s acidic comments about Kazan, Dmytryk’s hands must
also be “far from clean”. Needless to say, Dmytryk also suffered at the hands
of the same pathological Hollywood Left that waged a vicious anti-Bush
campaign Led by the two-faced likes of Clooney. The Australian followed Danielsen’s
predictable left-wing review with
Hollywood in Love by Lynden Barber. His contribution to the debate
(23 March 1999) was to slavishly follow the ‘party line’ and denounce Elia
Kazan for having “ruined the careers of eight of his friends by naming them
to the House of Un-American Activities Committee during the McCarthy era”.
That
was damning enough for him, except that it is not true. Every Stalinist that
Elia Kazan identified to the committee had already been named by other
witnesses. Regardless of what the lying Danielson, Barber and their
‘journalistic’ left-wing ilk would have readers believe, Kazan’s testimony
did not destroy any Hollywood careers. Those he named did not work in
Hollywood but in the New York theatre.
We now
come to The Age — a mephitic
leftist Melbourne rag dripping with self-righteousness and intellectual
pretensions — that brought its readers the equally leftist views of Richard
Dreyfus, who seems to have quite a few intellectual pretensions of his own as
well as an apparent inability to connect with the truth. He stated that Elia
Kazan’s anti-communism “lasted barely as long as it took to testify in front
of the House of Un-American Activities Committee”. That is a lie, as we have
already seen. He then asserted that Arthur Schlesinger Jr had written in the New York Times that the only people
“against Kazan, were communists themselves”.
This is
another lie. Schlesinger actually wrote: “Mr. Kazan’s critics are those — or
latter-day admirers of those — who continued to defend Stalin after the
Moscow trials…” (emphasis added). Clooney and Dreyfus clearly appear to fall
into the category of “latter-day admirers”. Of course, he does criticise the
left for not “condemning Stalinism for what it was”. That the Left was fully
aware of the bestial nature of Stalinism clearly eluded Mr Dreyfus’ keen
moral sense and deep grasp of history.
But as
is always the case with leftists, Dreyfus’ criticism turned out to be merely
a ploy to shield himself against accusations of Stalinist sympathies because
he then accused the Right of using Stalin’s barbarism as a means of “wrapping
its virulent anti-communism in virulent anti-Semitism, racism and nativism
(whatever that is)”. This is what logicians call the tu quoque fallacy or, in
plain English, you too. This amounts to “whatever I did you did it too — or
even worse”. All that Dreyfus* did is parrot the leftist anti-American line
and tried to pass it off as a serious argument. Note, however, that he
attacks “virulent anti-communism”.
Does
he, I wonder, also attack virulent anti-Naziism? He calls the Hollywood Ten
“principled” (nine after Dmytryk recoiled from their Stalinism) even though
they were dedicated Stalinists who were aware of his crimes and yet still
supported him. No wonder Dreyfus ardently supports Obama, they inhabit the
same moral vacuum.
(Dmytryk
actually left the Communist Party about six months before the hearing. I also
noticed that Dreyfus chose to ignore Dmytryk’s support for Elia Kazan’s
actions. After all, acknowledging Dmytryk’s views would completely undermine
his argument that it was immoral to inform on Hollywood Stalinists — but not,
I presume, members of the Ku Klux Klan or any neo-Nazi organisations).
That
innocent people were hurt and careers destroyed during this period is
indisputable and inexcusable. It needs to be remembered, however, that this hysteria
was fuelled by the success of Soviet expansion in Eastern Europe, the Berlin
blockade, the attempted communist take-over of Greece, communist threats in
Italy and France, communist victory in China, the Korean war and Stalin’s out
and out viciousness.
As I
said, though this does not excuse what happened it does help put it in its
proper historical perspective. And only the innocent, not the guilty, have
the moral right to complain and not the likes of Arthur Miller. This shameful
period inspired him to write The Crucible
but nothing inspired him to write an allegory about Stalin’s purges and show
trials. (At least Miller had the decency to support the award of the
life-time achievement Oscar to Elia Kazan).
In
addition, let us not forget that the release of the Venona Papers ultimately confirmed that
the American Communist Party, and that also means the Hollywood Ten, had
always been under Moscow’s control. Motivated by patriotism, honour and
principle, Elia Kazan told the truth about the Hollywood left and that was
his real crime. That is why the self-righteous likes of Dreyfus, the late Rod
Steiger (a rotten ingrate if there ever was one), Nick Nolte, Ed Harris (both
burning with hate) and their media soul mates are repelled by him. And that
is also why they will never demand that the left apologise for its treason.
The
Elia Kazan scandal should be a constant reminder hat it is the left that
pursues political vendettas and not the so-called Right. A nasty little fact
that is amply confirmed by the Hollywood left’s vicious attacks on
Republicans. It says a great deal about the state of the Democratic Party
that its Leninist-hardcore is generously supported by these celluloid
intellectuals.
Note:
When Clinton was president Clooney made The
Peacemaker, a film about terrorists trying to get hold of a nuke.
He played the role of the hero who broke the rules to save the day. As soon
as America put a Republican in the White House he responded by making Syriana, a movie that depicts America as
the villain and terrorists as victims and heroes. His nauseating hypocrisy
confirms my opinion that Dems like Clooney don’t have a country — they, like
Lenists, have only a Party.
* * * *
*
Why are
so many Hollywood celebrities from Streisand to Dreyfus and from them to Ron
Howard, Julian Moore and Harvey Weinstein so politically dense? Part of
the answer, apart their ignorance and lack of judgment — to put it mildly —
they have all been influenced directly or indirectly by Margery Tabankin who
has been a ‘political adviser’ to a number of celluloid intellectuals, among
them the cretinous Barbra Streisand and the mendacious Dreyfus. Streisand was
so impressed with Tabankin’s hatred of the US that she appointed this fanatic
Executive director of the Barbra Streisand Foundation.
This
brings me to Steve Spielberg, the man who said his audience with Castro were
“the eight most important hours of my life”. Spielberg made Tabankin an
executive director of his Righteous Persons Foundation. Then we have the
Christian-hating Norman Lear who put her on the board of directors member of
People for the [Anti]-American Way.
So who
is Margery Tabankin? She is a fanatical leftist who loves Castro, hates
Israel and loathes the United States. She also has links to the
Washington-based Marxist-Leninist Institute of Policy Studies that openly
collaborated with the KGB. It now fronts for Castro and also rationalizes the
terrorism being waged against the West by Islamo-fascists.
*Otto
Katz, the Stalinist agent who declared that he had “discovered Hollywood”,
was arrested in Prague on Stalin’s orders in 1952, given a show trial
and then hanged, after which his body was burnt in the prison yard. Prison
guards shovelled his ashes and bones into a sack which was then taken out of
the city and dumped in a rubbish filled ditch. A fitting and ironic end for a
man who was prepared to send millions to their deaths. Needless to say, not a
single Hollywood leftist uttered a word of protest at his treatment or made
the slightest gesture of sympathy. They were too busy smearing Elia Kazan.
|
