Good Night and Good Riddance

I tried to sit through a showing of George Clooney's Good Night, and Good Luck. I really did. I had to leave when it became apparent the film was just another example of the American Left's historical mythology.

I should have expected as much. Honestly, the Left has such a hold on Hollywood that when I hear some director blathering on about how his next film is going to be "political" or about "issues," I pretty much assume it will be Left propaganda.

Don't hold your breath waiting for a balanced (or even honest) film about McCarthy, et alia. Remember what recently happened when Kazan finally got his due recognition? The white-lipped anger and venom on display? Decades later, when even the Russians have admitted McCarthy was not jumping at shadows, the American Left cannot admit the truth.

I mean, really... would it kill Hollywood to make a movie about McCarthy that acknowledges the reality of Soviet espionage and subversion?

McCarthy & Co. made their share of mistakes, to be sure, but the enemy they were fighting was real and dangerous. Following the end of the Cold War, mountains of espionage and intel documents became available from the former USSR. That, plus now-declassified materials from the USA (such as the Venona transcripts) show that if anything, Americans weren't paranoid enough about subversion and infiltration. McCarthy was not perfect - not even the best man for the job. But he did quite a bit of good. First, and most obviously, the mere act of going on the offensive against Red infiltration put the Soviets on the defensive. They were forced to become much more careful, cut certain recruitment operations altogether, and did in fact lose a number of key operatives to McCarthy and HUAC's investigations. In the end, he was not the best man for the job because he cast his net too wide and wasn't patient enough.

I find it interesting that "McCarthyism" is a voodoo word coined by the very same American Leftists who spent the entire Cold War bending over backwards to avoid confronting the true nature of the Soviet Empire - a political system that raised repression, paranoia and persecution to an art form.

From the first, McCarthy was loudly criticized by his foes - both CPUSA fellow-travelers and patriotic Americans who honestly thought he was wrong. People against him - common citizens as well as political figures - made speeches, wrote books and newspaper articles, went on TV and radio and readily availed themselves of every inch of their 1st Amendment freedoms.

How many were "silenced?" How many doors were kicked in at midnight, the entire family being dragged away for "questioning?" How many hundreds and thousands of journalists, political opponents, artists, scholars and intellectuals were marched away to re-education/work camps - many to never return? How many were tortured or summarily executed?

Even at the height of "McCarthyism," you could slam Joe McCarthy in a New York Times op-ed, published in your own name, go home that night and sleep like a baby. That's what Edward Murrow did, and if George Clooney considers such efforts to be "courage" on the level of some Russian telling Lavrenti Beria to kiss his ass, he is simply delusional.

I'm also getting tired of hearing about all these supposed "victims" of McCarthy and the anti-Communist effort in general. Who were/are these people? How often did the spotlight fall on good Americans whose words and deeds gave no grounds whatsoever to raise suspicion?

Is the existence of actual sedition among CPUSA members, leaders and sympathizers incidental or irrelevant to how McCarthy and the anti-Communist movement more generally are to be viewed?

Or, let me put it this way: Why is the word witch hunt used so often in conjunction with McCarthy or Anti-Communist unless the intent is to suggest that there were as many seditious Communists as there were actual witches in Salem - that is, none?

Why is this? Witch hunt, we hear, over and over again. Could it be that the American Left - and especially their Arts & Crafts contingent in Hollywood - doesn't want anyone to look too closely at just how taken they were with Communism, up to and sometimes including placing themselves in service to the USSR?

If the CPUSA had been a bona fide domestic reform movement, if the anti-communists really were chasing phantoms, that would be one thing. Then I, too, would demonize McCarthy and his allies.

But that's simply not true. The problem was real.

(For how real it was in Hollywood, check out Red Star Over Hollywood: The Film Colony's Long Romance With The Left by Ronald Radosh.)

Witch hunt, my ass. There were no witches in Salem, but there sure as Lenin were Commies in Hollywood and the State Dept.

Every serious discussion of this subject must begin with the recognition that the CPUSA was a subversive fifth-column movement controlled by a hostile foreign power. That is an objective fact.

Having recognized this, the question is (and was): What to do about it? The Bill of Rights is not a suicide pact; our society has both the right and need to defend itself from those committed to its destruction.

It fits the romantic self-image of the American Left to see those investigated by HUAC, the FBI and McCarthy as martyrs to Cold War hysteria and the eee-vil Right Wing, but the facts do not support that story and never did. Of course, Hollywood is the land of dreams, the American mythology factory, and the Leftists who populate it do their best to keep slicing the baloney.

On a more general note, I would call out both the American Right and Left for their respective blind spots regarding 20th century Communism.

The Right saw Commies behind every tree and was tone-deaf to the real social and political injustices that made Communism so appealing to many suffering and oppressed people.

The Left, on the other hand, bent over backwards to avoid noticing just what all that rhetoric about workers and peasants and liberation actually resulted in once the Reds took over a country.

Many on the Left spent the decades from the October Revolution right up until the whole thing collapsed in late '80s hoping against hope that the USSR or some other Red State (heh heh) would incubate the long-awaited socialist utopia and lead humanity into a new and better age.

Marxist Communism is a remarkably "religious" ideology in this way, and those Americans who went beyond hoping and decided to lend a hand - Hiss, Fuchs, Rosenbergs, etc. - were not villains; they were True Believers. They honestly thought they were on the right side of history and human morality. (All the same, this doesn't excuse treason or change the propriety of their punishments.)

Nothing dies as hard as a dream, and it should come as no surprise that many on the Left (in Hollywood and elsewhere) were, and are, loathe to consciously and publicly confront the fact that the Bolsheviks and Maoists took them for a ride, used them and made a mockery of their democratic, egalitarian and emancipatory ideals.

That's why episodes like l'affaire Rosenberg is still so touchy for some. It's bad enough to have to admit that they were spies, after all, but to also acknowledge that they were naive stooges of a horrible tyrant is just more than some people can bear.