It takes a heart of stone not to laugh at Liberals, who are like High School football stars going back 50 years to their glory days while the oppression of the press under Obama.

A journalist asks those involved in the new film, "The Post," some obvious questions:

//For example, he reminded Streep and Spielberg that President Barack Obama flexed his might against journalists via the Espionage Act. Here’s how Jake Tapper put it:

“The Obama administration has used the Espionage Act to go after whistleblowers who leaked to journalists … more than all previous administrations combined.”

That doesn’t take into account Obama’s war against Fox News or how he spied on Fox News’ James Rosen.

How did Streep and Spielberg, hardcore Democrats who supported Obama during his two presidential terms, react? Let’s just say each has a potent political career awaiting them given their fancy footwork.

Here’s Asi’s corker:

“If you look at the numbers, there were more prosecutions under the Espionage Act during the Obama administration than any other administration. Yet no one in Hollywood was urged to say something about it, or do something about it…”

How did Spielberg answer?

He didn’t. He dodged the question entirely, rambling on about how Daniel Ellsberg, the key source behind The Pentagon Papers’ acquisition, wanted to stop the Vietnam War. Or something. Watch the clip yourself and see if his answer even remotely addresses the question (start at the 7:35 mark).

What about Streep?

The video doesn’t directly connect the question and answer, although given Streep’s response it’s apparent she’s attempting to answer it without actually doing so.

“I think it’s good that that is exposed now. I think we have to hold not only people that we have adversarial political views from to task but I think we also have to hold our friends and our compatriots, people who follow a line of policy that we agree with, we have to hold them to the same standard. I think that’s absolutely valid and important. And that’s sort of what the film is about.”

Asi asked a tough, but fair, question to these A-list stars. He deserves plenty of credit for that … even if the stars couldn’t fairly fire off a response.//

Flacking for Stalin; flacking for Hitler and Stalin; but flacking for Stalin mostly.

Trumbo


//Trumbo was no defender of free speech. He was a serious Communist and a defender of Stalin and the Soviet Union. Trumbo used his power in the film community to prevent proposed anti-Communist films from being made. “Whenever a book or play or film is produced which is harmful to the best interests of the working class,” Trumbo wrote to another blacklisted writer, “that work and its author should and must be attacked in the sharpest possible terms.” Calling Stalin “one of the democratic leaders of the world,” Trumbo moved to prevent a film being made that was to be based on Leon Trotsky’s biography of the Soviet leader. He also claimed to have stopped movies being made by anti-Communist authors such as James T. Farrell, Victor Kravchenko and Arthur Koestler, whose works he called “untrue and reactionary.”

He could not have claimed innocence of Stalin’s crimes. In 1956, after Nikita Khrushchev’s speech about Stalin to a Party Congress, he told an old friend of his that he was not surprised, because he had read George Orwell, Koestler, James Burnham, Eugene Lyons and Isaac Don Levine, authors who told the truth about Soviet totalitarianism. In other words, Trumbo supported Stalin while knowing at the time that “Uncle Joe” was a monster and murderer.

In the movie, there are many scenes of the Hollywood Ten meeting and planning what to do when they received subpoenas to testify before HUAC. They decide that the only honest course was to invoke the First Amendment, which would allow them to hoodwink the liberal community about their actual beliefs, while appearing as defenders of America’s basic principle of free speech.

One of the ten, the director Edward Dmytryk, later broke with his comrades and appeared as a friendly witness before the Committee, and as he recounts in his book Odd Man Out: A Memoir of the Hollywood Blacklist, the Communist Party controlled the entire strategy employed before the Committee. Instead of a free speech defense, the Communist Party dictated that they should not answer the Committee’s questions, never reveal their true affiliations to anyone, and appear rowdy and contemptuous at their testimony.

Even the left-leaning historian Larry Ceplair, writing with Steven Englund in their book The Inquisition in Hollywood, could not help but acknowledge the truth. The Hollywood Communists, they wrote, “defended the Stalinist regime, accepted the Comintern’s policies and about-faces, and criticized enemies and allies alike with infuriating self-righteousness, superiority, and selective memory which eventually alienated all but the staunchest fellow travelers.” It should not be a surprise that you don’t learn this from watching Trumbo.

"Victims" of the Hollywood Blacklist are less cuddly...

...after you learn that they were apologists for Hitler.

But Trumbo was no intellectual waif writing a pacifist novel. Published “the very month that Hitler marched into Poland,” Ann Coulter recently wrote, Johnny Got His Gun was “a pure propaganda piece designed to squelch American ardor for helping Hitler’s victims.” Trumbo’s novel was written during the Hitler-Stalin Non-Aggression Pact; as City Journal’s Stefan Kanfer notes in the middle of his review of two recent books on the blacklist:

At first glance, Johnny could pass for the tract of a conscientious objector, ruing the results of Woodrow Wilson’s call to “make the world safe for democracy.” But the book had a hidden agenda: Trumbo had fallen under the spell of Communism and now marched in lockstep with the Party line: Germany and Britain, preparing for all-out war, should duke it out themselves. Never mind the reports of Nazi atrocities; America must not get involved in this European squabble.

The Communist Daily Worker was delighted to serialize Johnny in its pages, and with good reason: the U.S.S.R. had recently signed a nonaggression pact with the Third Reich. But in June 1941, Hitler’s armies invaded Russia. Overnight, Johnny was excised from the Worker’s pages. Now, combat was not only moral but mandatory. When Trumbo’s publishers chose not to keep his novel in print, he went along with their decision. Trumbo sees no inconsistency in the writer’s position. “By 1941,” the book straight-facedly reports, “Hitler had become a menace to the whole world, and when the United States entered the war against Germany in December of that year Trumbo saw ‘no other way than to support it.’”

Also crafted during this same period was Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator, which had a message quite similar to Trumbo’s Johnny, Ron Rosenbaum, the author of the 1998 book, Explaining Hitler wrote in 2006: 

And speaking of trivializing, there is no more trivializing, over-rated, treatment of Hitler than Chaplin’s dimwitted, laboriously unfunny Great Dictator. Yes Chaplin made some funny movies, but when he tried his hands at politics Chaplin made a movie that did nothing but help Hitler because he made him seem like an unthreatening clown just at a time, 1940, when the world needed to take Hitler’s threat seriously.Yet Chaplin’s film makes it seem like Hitler was nothing but a harmless fool (like Chaplin, same mustache and all). And he made it at a time, during the Nazi-Soviet pact, when the world most needed to mobilize against Hitler’s threat. And yet Chaplin, to his eternal shame ended the film not with a call to oppose fascism, and its murderous hatred, but rather—because he was following the shameful Hitler-friendly Soviet line at the time—ended his film with a call for all workers in the world to lay down their arms—in other words to refuse to join the fight against fascism and Hitler.

Pete Seeger was also making similar noises in his folk music during this period, as PJM’s own Ron Radosh — who in his younger days took banjo lessons from Seeger! — wrote in the New York Sun in 2007:

[In] August 1939 Hitler and Stalin signed a pact and became allies. Overnight the communists took a 180-degree turn and became advocates of peace, arguing that Nazi Germany, which the USSR had opposed before 1939, was a benign power, and that the only threat to the world came from imperial Britain and FDR’s America, which was on the verge of fascism. Those who wanted to intervene against Hitler were servants of Republic Steel and the oil cartels.

In the “John Doe” album, Mr. Seeger accused FDR of being a warmongering fascist working for J.P. Morgan. He sang, “I hate war, and so does Eleanor, and we won’t be safe till everybody’s dead.” Another song, to the tune of “Cripple Creek” and the sound of Mr. Seeger’s galloping banjo, said, “Franklin D., Franklin D., You ain’t a-gonna send us across the sea,” and “Wendell Willkie and Franklin D., both agree on killing me.”

The film does not tell us what happened in 1941, when — two months after “John Doe” was released — Hitler broke his pact with Stalin and invaded the Soviet Union. As good communists, Mr. Seeger and his Almanac comrades withdrew the album from circulation, and asked those who had bought copies to return them.

For almost 70 years now, “Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia/Eurasia” has been a catchphrase to describe breathtaking intellectual 180-degree pivots. (QED: Democrats and Iraq.) Orwell’s inspiration for the constantly shifting fronts in the futuristic dystopia of 1984 was based on how his fellow socialists reacted after Hitler violated his non-aggression pact with Stalin.

Daniel Hannan wrote in the London Telegraph last year that “The greatest cultural victory of the Left has been to disregard the Nazi-Soviet Pact” and toss it down the Memory Hole, to borrow another Orwellianism:

To the modern reader, George Orwell’s depiction of how enmity alternates between Eurasia and Eastasia seems far-fetched; but when he published his great novel in 1948, such things were a recent memory. It suited Western Leftists, during and after the War, to argue that Hitler had been uniquely evil, certainly wickeder than Stalin. It was thus necessary to forget the enthusiasm with which the two tyrants had collaborated.

* * * * * * *

In his Sword of Honour trilogy, Evelyn Waugh, largely through gentle subtext, told the story of how Soviet sympathisers in the West used the alliance with the USSR to rehabilitate its doctrines. Hayek, writing in 1944, devoted the greater part of his Road to Serfdom to refuting the idea that Nazism and Communism were opposed ideologies, well aware of how fervently this idea was being promoted.

He was right; but he made little impact. If you want to see how successful the propagandists of the time were, look at the reaction you get today when – as I did recently – you recite a few unadorned facts that point to the socialist nature of fascism.

Living History.  

I'm watching a movie with Gerard Depardiu called Vidocq, about an early 19th century criminal turned detective.

Turns out that there was such a person and there is a society of people interested in solving real crimes that takes its name from Msr. Vidocq.

Fascinating.

Hollywoods missing movies.

Where is the great epic about how Stalin made the Holocaust possible?

The left has been in favor of Blacklists for a long time.

The Left's support of Free Speech is purely tactical.

//Once on a British talk show in the early 1970s, anticommunist actor John Wayne startled the host by acknowledging that there was indeed a Hollywood blacklist.  Wayne’s follow-up, however, made the host’s jaw drop even farther; the blacklist, he stated, wasn’t wielded by industry anticommunists against Communist Party members, but by the reverse.  It was for this reason, Wayne stated, that he enlisted in the anticommunist fight in order to defend conservative screenwriters and get them back on the payroll.

Wayne, regarded by the Old and New Left, as a fascist, was in actuality more of a rebel against the establishment than they ever would be.  The “establishment” in this case was Left Coast Hollywood, already entrenched by the early 70s, who, taking a leaf from the Hollywood communist narrative, asserted that the blacklisted were liberals battling fascism in the form of industry anticommunists.  Upholders of free speech rather than the Stalinists they were, they paid the consequences for their New Deal liberalism by going to jail and being denied employment in the industry for two decades.   Their eventual triumph wasn’t just in overturning the blacklist, but in getting modern day Hollywood, academia and liberals to accept their narrative.  Hence, anticommunist movie stars like Robert Taylor have had their names removed from buildings, while blacklisted screenwriters such as Dalton Trumbo have free speech fountains at colleges dedicated to them.

This spin is nourished by the memoirs of the children of the blacklisted, who give the narrative more poignancy by showing how the blacklist warped their childhoods.  These recollections all follow the same theme: assertions by the children that their parents were not knee jerk Stalinists; followed by a strong, loving family unit (no affairs or alcoholism are allowed into this narrative); then the unit is warped while at the same time being brought closer together as the blacklist hits; then a decade of near-poverty, school yard bullying, and a redemptive move toward leftist politics.

More than honoring the memory of their parents is involved here.  As with Left Coast Hollywood, they have followed the narrative by continuing how they were used by their parents in protests against their jail terms—displayed with placards bearing how their parents were going to jail while their parents stood piously by.

By contrast, the children of their anticommunist foes have stayed silent.  But Allen Ryskind, the son of the blacklisted’s bete noir, Academy-awarding screenwriter Morrie Ryskind, does not engage in self-pity or strumming the violin in Hollywood Traitors.  While he notes that his father was the victim of the blacklist Wayne spoke of, he doesn’t play on it.  Nor does he use the example of his father—a Jew and member of the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League and the Screenwriters’ Guild as well as a two-time voter for FDR—to refute the Left’s charge that their opponents were anti-Semites, anti-labor and anti-New Deal.

I hate bad history.

I hate lazy, ideological bias masquerading as history.

Initially repulsed by the bloodlust of the Northmen, Athelstan developed a sort of Stockholm Syndrome in the course of his captivity, apparently backsliding from his Christian faith and gradually assimilating into pagan culture. In the recent episode “An Eye for an Eye,” he is taken prisoner yet again, this time by the Christian, Anglo-Saxon enemy of Ragnar and his seafaring raiders. A bishop condemns Athelstan for his apostasy, and he is tortured and nailed to a cross.

At this point, I did a mental double-take. Crucifixion? Certainly other cultures – most notably, of course, the ancient Romans – have carried out this monstrous punishment on Christians (and others). But, student of the Middle Ages that I once was, I never heard of Christians perpetrating it themselves, even in the heart of the aptly-named Dark Ages, a particularly savage time in European history (not that human savagery has abated that much). Considering that Christ’s torturous death on the cross is at the very heart of the religion, it doesn’t even make theological sense that believers would turn around and inflict it themselves. That’s not to say that the Church throughout history hasn’t been guilty of other cruelties. But crucifixion?

Researching this online, I stumbled across A.J. Delgado’s take on this same Vikings episode. She had exactly the same response as mine, and even reached out to a world-renowned medieval history professor about it. His response? “I know of no instance in the history of Christianity in which any Christians crucified others, even apostates.”

Of course, we’re talking about television drama and not a history lecture. Hollywood always plays fast and loose with historical fact, sometimes out of storytelling necessity and sometimes for political reasons. But this was a fairly eyebrow-raising deviation from historical truth, partly because it was so unnecessary. The bishop and his soldiers could have punished Athelstan in any number of bloody ways that would have been more historically correct, and the storyline wouldn’t have suffered for it.

So why choose crucifixion? And why hammer home the point (if you’ll pardon the pun) by depicting Athelstan as a Christ figure himself – flayed, crowned with thorns, and clad only in the familiar white cloth around his loins? Throw in a stereotypically fat, corrupt bishop, and it seems that Athelstan’s crucifixion was simply designed to paint Christians as cruel hypocrites, merciless crucifiers themselves.

This is disappointing but predictable treatment of Christians onscreen. //

 Huh?  Wait a second.  According to Hollywood and our secular elites, only Christians did this kind of thing.

The 800 Martyrs of Otranto -