The "Hollywood Holocaust"

From J.P. Freire:

Howard Kurtz calls our attention to the Hollywood Reporter where the current publisher issued an apology for what he termed the “Hollywood Holocaust,” in which the industry magazine, “Hollywood Reporter,” led by his father, Billy Wilkerson, led a “crusade” against the Communist Party in Hollywood. Kurtz describes the effort as “odious” and an “appalling chapter of the publication’s history.” Kirk Douglas said that the period was “the most sinful period in Hollywood’s history.”The five page apology rounds up those who felt wronged, but treats the Soviet Union as if it were never a threat. Strange. 

This way of looking at anti-Communist efforts in tinseltown flatly denies the nature of the American Communist Party, which sought to overtake American institutions and subjugate them to the Kremlin. No big deal, I guess, but worth clarifying: A holocaust is a slaughter on a mass scale. The blacklist made it hard for Kremlin-connected Hollywood actors (sympathetic to Soviet victory in the Cold War) to find work. Not similar.

We know from the Soviet archives and reams of testimony that Communism wasn’t a mere set of opinions or some marginalized activist political third party. It was a calculated underground effort, organized in cells, to expand the power of the Kremlin to America. It wasn’t a group of silly idealists who weren’t taken seriously, but a collection of elites who had become quite taken with Stalin and his ilk. All those secret meetings weren’t secret because they were living in fear of the Red Scare and mean ol’ Amuricans who wouldn’t tolerate dissent.Those secret meetings were secret because they were figuring out how to fight for International Communism in America, just as the Baader Meinhoff gang would later attempt in West Germany.

One of the more striking delusions of the 20th century is the bizarre 'victimhood' status conferred on Communists and fellow-travelers in the United States, especially during the McCarthy era (an era of sanity and justice) and during the Hollywood boycott of screenwriters with ties to the CPUSA.

Communism is the full moral equivalent of Nazism. They are both claques of blood-soaked socialist gangsters. The CPUSA was owned, funded and controlled by Moscow. From the late 1920's to the early 1950's that meant that that commies in the U.S. were taking Stalin's orders and doing Stalin's bidding. They knew it and did it eagerly.

I believe in second chances, so Americans who publicly repudiated their earlier participation in totalitarian sedition and worked to fight Communism should be given a pass. We forgave Whittaker Chambers, as we should have. But the bastards who denied the truth of their complicity in this evil, or who continued to work for International Socialism, deserve the worst our society can throw at them. They deserved to be rigorously criminally prosecuted --knowingly working for an organization secretly funded by a foreign government without registering as an agent of that government was illegal, as was espionage, as was advocating violent overthrow of the government. Of course Communists should be privately shunned, as Nazis should be shunned, and the blacklist should be airtight and rigorously enforced.

Again: Communism is the full moral equivalent of Nazism. Nothing that was done to the commies and fellow-travelers in the U.S. was unjust, except our excessive leniency, and nothing that was done to these totalitarian bastards was anywhere near as cruel as what they would have done to us, if they could have.