Elia Kazan: the iraq war and the Hollywood left
Addison Ross
The disgusting treatment dished out to Elia Kazan by the Hollywood left is basically no different from what they are now dishing out to President Bush's war on terrorism and his preparations for war against Saddam.
Elia Kazan had committed the unforgivable sin of revealing the names of Hollywood Stalinists, people who had worked to introduce the wonderful benefits of the Gulag to the American public.
I do not know a single person who has not heard of Senator McCarthy, Elia Kazan and the Hollywood blacklist, even though McCarthy had nothing to do with it. The mere mention of McCarthy’s name at any of Hollywood's progressive parties is sufficient to cause mass vomiting, though not the names of Lenin, Stalin or Castro.
But mention the little matter of Hollywood's left-wing blacklist — the one the American mainstream media suppressed — and you will be met with disbelieving stares.
Those who were on this list were anti-communists like Elia Kazan, who suffered for their beliefs because they had the courage to identify Stalinist toadies. Morrie Ryskind was another one. He was an award-winning film writer until he told a congressional committee the truth about Stalinists in the film industry. Suddenly he was unemployable.
The situation is not much different now. Not in the sense that an actual blacklist exists but through peer group pressure and the fear that if one's Republican (fascist in Hollywood) sympathies were made known one's career prospects would quickly come to a halt.
Of course, the situation may not be anywhere as bad as this, though the film critic John McDonough has stated otherwise. Nevertheless, an atmosphere of fear and intimidation exists. The way leftists like Richard Dreyfus lashed out at Elia Kazan is enough to remove any scepticism regarding the vindictiveness of the Hollywood left.
Even well-established stars fear to publicly express patriotic or &$0151 even worse &$0151 pro-Bush sentiments. The pressure to conform to Hollywood leftwing groupthink, epitomized by that self-appointed political commissar Barbra Streisand, is immense and menacing and is quickly transformed, as if on cue, into groupspeak.
And who are the enforcers? Displaced personalities totally disconnected from economic and political reality: people for whom politics is nothing more than a politically correct script, a substitute for thinking. For these people there are only two types of Republicans: stupid ones and evil ones.
But why would so many Hollywood luminaries permit this situation to develop? Their attitude to the American Communist Party (CPUSA) certainly helps explain their behavior. The left assiduously cultivated the myth that the CPUSA was never a threat in anyway to the US and that all those associated with it were honest people motivated only by idealism and a love of freedom. Those like Elia Kazan who chose to tell the truth about Hollwood Stalinists where hounded out of town.
It follows from this that it is absurd and slanderous to suggest that communists and fellow travellers would use their positions in Hollywood to promote communism. But the collapse of the Soviet empire and the subsequent opening of some the KGB's archives revealed the real story, the one the Hollywood left and the mainstream media has ignored, despite the efforts of the likes of Elia Kazan to bring to the public's attention.
The evidence is indisputable: the CPUSA was fully controlled and financed by the Soviets. It was nothing more than a sycophantic branch of the CPSU (Communist Party of the Soviet Union).
One might say that that is all history, water under the bridge and all that. And it is certainly the kind of thing Billy Crystal or Richard Dreyfus, both of whom defended those Hollywood activists who happily took their marching orders from Stalin, with Dreyfus going so far as to even libel Elia Kazan, might say.
But anyone who thinks in terms of bygones are bygones has no idea of the left's capacity for hatred and revenge, especially the Hollywood Left and its fellow traveling media allies. (Incidentally, several years ago two young left-wing writers on the Sony Studio Lot got Robert Montgomery’s name taken off a building because he had been a “friendly witness” to HUAC. It was an act of political vindictiveness that neither Dreyfus nor Crystal publicly objected to).
This was made sickeningly clear when the Hollywood left blocked the distinguished director Elia Kazan's nomination by colleagues for the lifetime achievement award given each year by the American Film Institute and the Los Angeles Film Critics Association.
Elia Kazan who had directed such masterpieces as On the Waterfront, East of Eden and A Streetcar Named Desire and who had won two Oscars as a director was ignored in favor of the left-wing Norman Corman who won lasting fame for The Monster from the Ocean Floor, Attack of the Crab Monsters, Teenage Cave Man, Swamp Women and other cinematic classics.
Kazan's crime was to have truthfully told the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1952 that he and eight of his friends had been members of the communist party, from which he had resigned in disgust. Some of these men later admitted that Kazan had told the truth. Nevertheless, Elia Kazan and not the Stalinists was turned into a political leper, demonstrating just where the sympathies of Hollywood's politically correct really lie.
So heavy was the stench of hypocrisy that even The New York Times felt impelled to comment adversely on Hollywood's vindictiveness. Now the same leftist scum are attacking Bush. Why aren't I surprised?
Although I have taken a broad bush to Hollywood I should make it clear that not all Hollywood leftists harbored bitter feelings toward Elia Kazan.
I noticed that when Kazan finally received his lifetime achievement award Warren Beatty enthusiastically applauded him. Edd Harris and Nick Nolte's response consisted of folded arms and venomous stares. Some how there was a certain sadness there, not that they would understand my meaning.
BrookesNews.Com
Tuesday 4 Feb. 2003