My Usual Charming Self | Bernie Reeves

Red Star Shining

By Bernie Reeves

There it was, in Ronald Radoshs new book, archaeological grave goods that provide a direct link to the politically correct regime that dominates our culture today. Funny to find it in an engrossing examination of the drama that produced the Hollywood 10, the black list and the continuing affection today for Leftist causes in the movie capital by film colony grandees.

The book, Red Star Over Hollywood: The Film Colonys Long Romance With The Left, tracks the Hollywood love affair with communism in the context of Soviet policy from the 1930s through 1992, and how the communist movie workers reacted to the convoluted twists and turns emanating from Moscow. For example: how should good Party members and fellow travelers react to the bad news that Stalin suddenly allied himself with communisms arch enemy Hitler in 1939? After this bad spot of bother, came the good news that Hitler invaded the USSR and Party devotees could now return to common cause with the US against fascism. The pre-war strategy, to rally support for the worldwide Revolution by hitch-hiking with liberal democrats by drawing them into Popular Front organizations, was created in the 1930s under the guise of humanitarian support for the toiling masses of Soviet peasants, putting believers on the right side of history. Later, these Fronts purported to support the war, but in reality continued to be recruitment vehicles for the US Communist Party.

Subtler shifts included what to do if you are a good communist while Stalin set loose the purge trials in 1936-38, imprisoning and executing heroes of the Bolshevik Revolution in one of his frequent delusional fits of paranoia. The party line was that the victims were guilty: They confessed didn't they? And the Hollywood CP members and fellow travelers believed it, as they fell for the party line that the US invaded North Korea. As leading director, producer and screenwriter Philip Dunne put it, a good wheel-horse Communist has a digestive system like a goats and apparently can swallow anything.

As party leaders told the Hollywood communists in their cell meetings, dont trust negative views of the Soviet Union, and the good little Bolsheviks scouts did not. They busily went about their mission to create socialist realism and ideological remodeling, using the art of film as a weapon for the worldwide communist movement, imbued with the elevated status pronounced by Lenin: Of all the arts, the motion picture for us is the most important.

The Birth of PC
In the 1950s the Party was heavily invested in the Negro Liberation Movement, arguing that the large concentration of blacks in the South met Stalins criteria for a nation, thus their struggle was not for equality but, says Radosh, for a nation in southern areas where there was a black majority. The goal would be governmental separation and a Negro Republic in the Black Belt.

That never happened, mostly because black leaders were indifferent to leadership by white communists, but the effort spawned, says Radosh, what may be the first example of political correctness run amok. The Party expelled or brought to trial members whose only sin was using words like whitewash or black sheep, both of which were offered as proof of racism. Radosh quotes Joseph Starobin, a former editor of the communist Daily Worker newspaper, who explained in a history of the American CP: Both whites and blacks began to take advantage of the enormous weapon which the charge of white chauvinism gave them to settle scores, to climb organizational ladders, to fight for jobs and to express personally conflicts which, by Communist definition, were never supposed to predominate over political objectivity.

Sound familiar? The politically correct doctrine used by the communists to purge non-believers lives on today in the university, where radical students have become professors and continue the blatantly communist tactic of smearing enemies for the Party cause. The radical scholars have succeeded to stain traditional professors, and to revise history to suit their doctrinaire purposes. They accuse those who refuse to sign on to the new party line as racists, chauvinists and homophobes. And the politically correct virus has infected the nation, creating fear that any statement made can be used to smear leaders in business and government. And the speech purges and diversity initiatives, now a commonplace in Western society, are directly linked to communist antecedents. Nothing happens out of thin air.

Red Star Shining
When confronted with the wave of revelations over the past 20 years that discredit the Left and the majority of the intellectual establishment in the US, most of todays radicals react by saying: so what? That's in the past. But actually its very much in the present. As we now know, the PC movement grew out of communist infighting. As Radosh demonstrates, the core of the modern radical regime is the continuation of communism by other means. In schoolrooms and college courses, the result is the elevation of collective solutions and the denigration of individuality. Those that disagree are shipped off to a figurative gulag for political prisoners.

It is important to know that campus radicals are directly descended from communist forebears, just as it is key to our self-image that we know that American communists infiltrated the Franklin Roosevelt administration, causing policy decisions that defined the second half of the 20th Century: allowing the Soviets to bring down the Iron Curtain, literally enslaving 70 million people; dropping our guard so that Americans spying for the Soviets could deliver atomic secrets; standing by as the Soviets launched the Cold War and the daily fear of nuclear annihilation; not opposing propaganda that has resulted in a nefarious anti-Americanism that dominates academia and the media today; allowing the revising of history to cover up the depredations of the Soviet Union, even after its collapse; and watching as radicals stoke the flames of dissidence over any issue that does not toe the party line.

Right Here in Raleigh
On August 31 through September 2, before the Labor Day holiday, a whos who of experts on the subject of the continuing revisionist propaganda will convene in Raleigh for the third annual Raleigh International Spy Conference.

Ronald Radosh, the keynote speaker, will address the Hollywood Left; Harvey Klehr and John Earl Haynes, two of the most prominent researchers and authors on the subject of the true nature of Soviet influence on academia, will discuss their books and ask the question: Was Joe McCarthy right? Joining them is Venona expert Nigel West; former FBI agent-in-charge IC Smith (who will address the new menace of Chinese espionage in the US); Steve Usdin, whose new book uncovers the story of how atomic espionage continued to assist the Soviet Union after the execution of the Rosenbergs; and Ann Blackman, formerly of Time magazine and co-author of the definitive account of the treachery of Robert Hanssenon her new book about Civil War female spy Rose ONeal Greenhow. Go to www.raleighspyconference.com, or call the spy hotline at the NC Museum of History: 919-807-7917; or Kimry Blackwelder at Metro Magazine: 919-831-0999.

NOTES FROM LA-LA LAND
The pending collapse of the European Union on the heels of the huge No vote in France and Holland makes me cry for joy. You can go to our Web site and scroll down to my January 2004 column and read, under the subhead Top of the List: The EU is a construct along the lines of the USSR. It requires disparate peoples and nations to subsume their identity and sovereignty to a higher power in the name of an ideal. They go about building the EU with cast-aside Marxist central state theory using a curia of apparatchiks to enforce preposterous trade restrictions and rules as a jackboot to force compliance. And, I said then, and as long as 20 years ago, expect the Euro to go the way of the ruble.

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The Watergate scandal added a new chapter with the revelation of the identity of Deep Throat, who turned out to be former high-ranking FBI agent Mark Felt. As Mort Kondracke of Roll Call magazine put it as a panelist on Fox News, the question should be, why Watergate at all? The entire episode still exudes a fishy odor: how could former CIA security and clandestine officers bungle the burglary so badly in the first place? And how was it that Washington Post publisher Martha Graham was called at home immediately when it was then only, as they say, a third-rate burglary with no political connection imagined? And then there is the interesting information that journalist Carl Bernstein, Bob Woodwards partner in the famous story, is a red diaper baby, meaning he was the issue of openly communist parents who raised him to be a good little radicalin other words to hate America and Richard Nixon.

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DDT remains the enemy of the environmental extremists, as evidenced by a recent news item that some public schools in North Carolina are banning its use. Before we go too far here, lets ask the poor Africans who fell for the eco-activist line and now are dying in the millions from mosquito-borne disease.

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The comedian Lewis Black commented that Atlanta was operating a subway to nowhere. What would he think of the comical TTA plan to run light rail from downtown Raleigh to downtown Durham?

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Ann Bancroft died and sure enough the accolades failed to mention her best role in 84 Charing Crossroad as the 1950s-60s New York writer who ordered books from a London bookseller. It reminds me of the omission of what I think is Stanley Kubricks best film, Barry Lyndon, in the list of his best films discussed after his death two years ago.

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The writing tests for schoolkids is in, and once again the results are abysmal. What do you expect when probably half of the public school teachers in North Carolina are illiterate... and yes I look forward to a challenge to that statement. Far too many teachers have useless graduate degrees in education containing bogus curricula, revisionist theories and course content experiments that degrade English and History offerings. And teachers gain tenure after three years, making it impossible to weed out the incompetents. The good teachers are a minority and you can't get rid of the bad ones. Its a wonder every child is not left behind.