The Hollywood 'Holocaust'

J.P. Friere has a fine put down of Hollywood's 60+ year wallowing in the victimhood of blacklisting of Communists in the 50s.

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.

Read the whole thing.

Glenn Reynolds also comments:

Leaving aside the obscenity of comparing out-of-work screenwriters with gassed Auschwitz inmates, there’s this: Communists are no better than Nazis. Refusing to hire Communists is on the same moral plane as refusing to hire Nazis. Which is to say: It’s a good and admirable thing, not a sin. Go broke and starve, commies. It’s what you deserve for being eager, willing servants of totalitarianism.

Amen.