Report: Wife Scratched Tiger Woods' Face, Chased His SUV; Update: Police Unable To Interview Couple Today
Senate Report: Bush Missed Chance To Catch Bin Laden
Bloomberg Spent $102 Million On Campaign
Two Doors Fall Off AirTrain At JFK
Dogs Rescued From Puppy Mills And Shelters Arrive In L.I.
Yikes, the Grim Reaper takes more this week. Not only pioneering tennis player Althea Gibson died yesterday, but influential and ultimately HUAC name-naming film director Elia Kazan passed away as well. The amazing breadth of his work, contrasted with his unfortunate personal decisions that affected others, makes people wonder what is he to be judged on, his incomparable work alone (like On The Waterfront) or his overall professionalism. (Recently deceased filmmaker of Nazi propaganda Leni Riefinstahl is another, though more extreme, example of this life versus art debate.)
Roger Ebert's obituary of Elia Kazan.
add to stumble upon
add to reddit
tweet this
post to facebook
Ah, yes - it's OK to blacklist Kazan for being a conscientious patriot, but wrong to blacklist real Hollywood communists who were trying to use their influence to undermine the United States Government.
Proven facts: There was a Communist Party of the United States. It received funds and direction from Moscow. Its affiliate in Los Angeles was directly involved in exerting influence over the film industry, working to embed pro-communist, anti-capitaliist propaganda in American films, for the purpose of eventually affecting a violent overthrow of the United States Government.
As hard as it may be for vivacious, well-paid young 21st century yuppies to believe, there was a good 30 or 35 year stretch following World War II during which world communism was on the march, and capitalism in retreat. We very nearly lost the Cold War. The battle against Hollywood communists was a front in that war, and Elia Kazan fought on YOUR side. He should have gotten a medal.
Wow, sterling! (this is a friendly post, trust me) That is a very passionate defence of the blacklists.
I'm more of a fence sitter on this issue. Even as an admitted leftie, I too get irritated by the romantization the idealistic fools of the past who unwittingly allowed themselves to be manipulated by huge political forces that they did not understand (case in point ... the Abraham Lincoln Brigade were fighting for a cause even far more monsterious than Franco's alternative).
But, McCarthyism was not defending democracy. It was side-stepping the Constitution to destroy the lives of people who were guilty(at best) of little more than being idealistic fools.
In the case of Kazan, I really don't feel that he deserved a medal, but he certainly deserved to be forgiven for his actions. When Warren Beaty was the first stand and applaud Kazan's honor by the Acadamy, I actually felt a little choked up and emotionally proud. I also enjoyed laughing at Nick Nolte for sitting there looking like the fool that he is.
Remember how militant Amy Madigan and Ed Harris looked, sitting staunchly in their seats, when Kazan was honored?
Look - Calling anti-Communism "McCarthyism" is a gimmick. It's deriding a whole class of beliefs by naming it after its least attractrive proponent - it would be the same as calling modern liberalism "Sharptonism".
McCarthy was in the Senate (employing committee legislative aides Roy Cohn and Bobby Kennedy), and his unsteady efforts focused primarily on communist infiltration of government institutions like the State Department and the military - most of the congressional investigations into Hollywood were done by the House Un-American Affairs Committee, aka HUAC.
The "blacklist" was enacted by the studios, not the government (though it could be argued they feared government action), and was designed to remove known communist party members from positions of creative input in the film-making industry. I have no - zero - problem with that. The studios decided it was not in their interests to continue making movies that idealized communism. And so they stopped - for a while, anyway.
Were talented people forced out of the industry? Of course. Were people with no connection to the Communist Party forced out? Few, if any innocent bystanders were caught in the net.
I think Cy Enfield, for instance, was a brilliant director and I love his movies. But the United States was under threat and it was necessary to make sure our own media weren't in the pocket of the enemy.
I don't understand why attempting to infuse your political beliefs into your art is wrong in one instance (communism) and acceptable otherwise. Why would it be Ok to promote capitalist democracy in film and not communism?
that was my post.
Not really buying the blacklist had nothing to do with McCarthyism agrument. But as all things political or religous, we could argue until we were blue in the face, and despite what facts we bring to the table, neither one of us are going to change the others' mind one way or the other.
Well argued Sterling.
There's nothing wrong with infusing your political beliefs into your "art", but Hollywood is an industry which churns out entertainment. It ain't Picasso. It ain't even Norman Rockwell. It's one thing to present a set of ideas before the public for debate, it's another to subtly infuse seditious context in mass entertainment with the goal of winning through propaganda what you can't win through argument, i.e. overthrow of the government, workers of the world unite, blah blah blah.
Let's not forget that these Hollywood communists were, through their membership in the Communist Party of the USA, agents of a hostile foreign power. Would you approve if Hollywood infused sympathy for Muslim fundamentalism in its movies? If the next Meg Ryan romantic comedy favorably depicted a woman being stoned for having sex out of marriage, or a homosexual being whipped and castrated, a pickpocket having his hands cut off...how would you feel? The First Amendment doesn't protect conspiring to foment rebellion.
Elia Kazan saw them for what they were and didn't waste any time protecting them.
I wouldn't have any problem with any artist (yes, artist) injecting a little Islam into their films. Right now we have Richard Gere certainly (attempting to anyway) influence on the side of Buddhism and nobody complains. Not to mention Scorcese’s Dalai Lama love movie. Then there is the upcoming piece by Mel Gibson, which I cannot really talk about yet seeing as how I haven’t seen it, but I bet it certainly is a bit one sided seeing as how Gibson is a declared Catholic. Restricting any creative business from exploring themes of any kind is censorship. Now if it is the business itself that restricts itself, I can understand that – as they are most likely just giving the audience what they want. However, when it is a political body that is threatening a business as a whole with reprisals, then there’s a problem. Belonging to the communist party or even agitating (peacefully) for a communist revolution are all actions well within our constitutional rights as Americans.
As for your argument about a foreign power having some kind of influence over politics here in America is the exact same argument that was used against Kennedy when he ran for office.
Catholics and Jews have both historically been accused of "dual loyalty" - Catholics to the Vatican and Jews to Israel or World Jewry. It's a very different thing to be accused of dual loyalty than of being an agent of a hostile foreign power.
Also, I for one have a far more charitable view of Buddhism and Orthodox Christianity than I do of oppressive, anti-individualistic idealogies like communism or fundamentalist Islam. The former are quite compatible with our way of life and our Constitution - the latter are inimical and necessarily hostile to it. It's vulgar and disgusting for communists and Islamic fundamentalists to hide behind the Constitution, when they would throw it out the window as soon as they had the advantage. We have never been so suicidal as to extend the privileges of the Constitution to people who are vocally dedicated to destroying it, whether they be seditionists, secessionists, anarchists, communists or Muslims.
“I for one have a far more charitable view… “ - Therein lies the beauty of our rights as protected under the constitution. That any group of us (or even one of us) can not only chose to hold whatever view we want, but also to try to convince others that our view is worthwhile. The individuality you mentioned is the exact sort of strength that we should count on in people to help them recognize when their individualism is at risk. Unless of course this definition of individuality is simply one only in rhetoric and in ‘reality’ we cannot trust citizens to be bright enough to think for themselves and thusly need to make decisions for them. An idea that makes me very uneasy.
If the communist party acting during that time would have been carrying out violent struggle to overthrow the government I would be more sympathetic. But they were simply idealists, no less so than Bush is a policy idealist. The only true communist agitation came in the teens and early 20s when several bombs were found in known communists’ possessions – one of whom was an Italian whose name escapes me. However, following WW2 communism was much more of an ideological struggle than it was an actual attempt at revolution.
As for manipulating the public with propaganda, there were tons of films put out at that time like Ninotchka (sp?), The Whip Hand, Invasion of the Bodysnatchers and Kazan’s own Man on a Tightrope that were anti-communist propoganda. By the time HUAC was convened, any sort of violent overthrow of the US govt. - especially by a bunch of out-of-touch directors and screenwriters - was absurd (and, I have never read of any evidence that says there was ever any serious talk of an attempt). Instead, the govt. was being reactionary (as it often is) and as the arms race was heating up, was looking to point the finger and anything that smacked of their ‘pinko’ enemies. It really isn’t a whole lot different (other than on scale) with the trend to blame Hollywood for turning our children into nymphomaniacs or killers when there are much deeper influences in the culture than just ‘Hollywood’ itself. But that's probably too deep for us. As it has always been, it is just easier to blame something so few of us have anything to do with.
McCarthy (among others) was a fabulist - from my own wonderful home state - who hated communism as much as he saw an opportunity for political gain by whipping the nation into a frenzy with…that’s right…anti-individualistic ideology that called on people not to think about ahy communism was bad, but to just 'trust him' that it was the greatest evil that could ever be imagined.
Abe - charming belittlement of the communist threat, but inaccurate. A few years after the blacklist, the Berlin Wall went up, and tanks rolled into Hungary. France, Italy and Greece were also in constant danger of falling to the communists, and then there was this little thing called the Cuban Missile Crisis. The Soviets needed a weak and dissolute United States to reduce resistance to their march across the globe - they used the gullibility of western artsy types ("useful idiots" in Stalin's memorable phrasing) to embed their propaganda in American films as part of their efforts to accomplish this.
Do you have any idea how many people died on Stalin's orders? He makes Hitler look like a piker. Communism was not just a set of ideas, it was the animating ideology of a country that openly boasted that it would wipe us from the earth. And if what happened in the Soviet Union, China and Cambodia is any indication, the wiping would have cost tens of millions of American lives.
So by all means, we should have allowed a handful of malcontents to continue in their treacherous collaboration with the Soviet Union, even though it risked the ability of the United States to resist the progress of a monstrous, murderous ideology that might otherwise have swept the globe.
The Communist Party of the USA was investigated and marginalized by the US Government, and it was the right thing to do.
Sterling, when I see references to the Soviets "march across the globe" or to "a good 30-35 year stretch following World War II during which world communism was on the march, and capitalism in retreat," I just have to say that your being alarmist in the extreme.
Look, I'm not defending Stalin, or Khruschev, or Chairman Mao, who, to use your own phrase, made Stalin look like a piker. But you'd have to be a little more specific, and actually identify when it was that the West "very nearly lost the Cold War."
The Soviet Union took a large chunk of territory at the end of World War II, and spent most of the time just trying to hold onto it.
If I can address a few of your points:
1. Tanks did roll into Hungary in 1956. But the USSR had annexed Hungary in 1945, at the end of World War II. After the death of Stalin in '53, and Khruschev's attack on Stalinist policies in '56, Hungary formed it's own gov't and attempted to withdraw from the Warsaw Pact. Then the tanks rolled in.
Look, this was a horrible brutal event, I know. But it's not an example of "communism on the march." The USSR was maintaining it's hold on a country that wanted to leave.
2. Berlin Wall? Erected because so many East Germans were using Berlin as a means to LEAVE Soviet control. It's not a symbol of an imminent Communist victory. More like an effort to stop the hemorrhage.
3. Cuban Missile Crisis? Well, maybe if the US gov't hadn't declared a trade embargo against Cuba, Castro wouldn't have been thrown into the arms of the USSR. And both sides were so frightened by the Cuban Missile Crisis that the signed the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty the next year.
Umm. I noticed that you left the Bay of Pigs off your list. Hardly that actions of a "weak and dissolute United States."
So when was the United States in danger of falling into the arms of Communism after World War II? Korean War? When it ended, the border was pretty much where it had been before it started (at the cost of huge casualties to all combatants).
The US was always ahead in the arms race, won that space race, and was by far the wealthiest country in the world at the end of World War II.
Besides, after 1945 the Communist party was a joke in the United States. Gullible western artsies aside, the US wasn't going to collapse from within. There were more dangerous extremists running around in the late '60s/early '70s than in the '50s of HUAC and Joe McCarthy.
If you want to defend Elia Kazan, fine. But don't imply that he was helping to forestall the imminent demise of the free world.
I never said the demise of the free world was imminent. Why would you put words in my mouth? But the fact is that it was an open contest and for most of the time between the end of WWII and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, we did poorly. Much of Europe held on by a thread - Greece, as I mentioned, also Italy and France had strong communist parties. When Hungary and Czechoslovakia attempted to assert their independence from the USSR, the US did nothing. We managed a draw in Korea and lost Vietnam. Most of Southeast Asia fell during the 60s and 70s, Central America began to go and remained an open question into the 80s. For you to say that world communism wasn't a threat to the United States is absurd. The Soviets were the first to launch a satellite and to put a man into orbit - it wasn't until the late 60s that we were able to take the lead.
We faced an external threat of enormous magnitude and also had to deal with communist sympathizers within. I don't know what you're argument is, really, there are three possibilities I've heard communist apologists make:
1) Those blacklisted had no association with communists, and were framed (this argument has been demolished in part by archival material from Eastern Europe - rarely used anymore).
2) Those blacklisted had a right to their beliefs (not used in the 50s because it was apparent that they would have been part of a conspiracy - adopted later, used with expectation that most people were too ignorant of the events to understand the fallacy.)
3) The Soviet Union and world communism were not a threat. (This was also not used at the time, because the threat was evident after the fall of China and the Korean War.)
So if you can come up with an argument that is consistent with the facts, I'm certainly interested in hearing it. But I'm operating under these premises:
1) The USSR, PRC and other communist powers did wish to undermine liberal Western governments and replace them with communist regimes, using force if necessary.
2) World communism spread from a handful of countries before WWII to dozens by the mid-60s.
3) All of those blacklisted had been associated with the CPUSA sometime between the 1930s and the 50s.
4) It has been proven that longtime CPUSA head Gus Hall received money and marching orders from Moscow. His was an organization that was tasked with weakening the US from within.
Two points:
What is all this business about McCarthyism. Do you people bringing that up with Kazan even know the timeline. Kazan testified before McCarthy came to prominance.
Secondly to place riefenstahl even anywhere near Kazan's name is jsut disgusting. nothing they said in their work or lives resemebled one another.