Elia Kazan & The Ongoing Communist Whitewash

Elia Kazan (1909-2003) was the director of such Hollywood classics as On the Waterfront & A Streetcar Named Desire. Ironically, he is best known for “naming names” of Communists he had known during a short spell as a CPUSA member during the thirties. For this he was excoriated by Communist (Illuminati) Jewish dupes who still dominate Hollywood. As Dave Martin explains, despite ample evidence that the Communist Party was run by Moscow, this courageous and patriotic act still is regarded by many as a blemish on his reputation.
 Communism is the Illuminati model for the New World Order…

“To be a member of the Communist Party is to have a taste of the police state. “ – ELIA KAZAN

“While Hollywood never seems to tire of movies that vilify the Nazis and, more recently, the Arabs and the Muslims, it is yet to produce anything [negative] about the Soviet bloc that begins to compare to the French movie, Est-Ouest (East-West), or the German movie, Das Leben der Anderen (The Lives of Others).“

by Dave Martin
“Elia Kazan: American Hero”
(Abridged/edited by henrymakow.com)

What in the world is going on here?  At the time that Kazan gave his testimony [in 1952,] we only knew a small part of the evils of Soviet Communism under Joseph Stalin.   The Soviet historian Roy Medvedev hadn’t published his exposé of Stalin entitled Let History Judge.  Most importantly, The Gulag Archipelago and the other great writings of Alexander Solzhenitsyn were still in the distant future.

 On the American political scene, the revelations of former Communists had just been published in the form of a book entitled The God That Failed three years before, in which the insidiousness of the Communist Party in the United States was put on full display.

 Former Communist spies Elizabeth Bentley and Whittaker Chambers had given their Congressional testimony, and one of the people Chambers accused of being a Soviet spy, Alger Hiss, had been convicted of perjury, but there were still a lot of people who believed that he, Lauchlin Currie, Owen Lattimore, and other high level Communists and Communist sympathizers were just victims of a witch hunt. 

Allen Weinstein, previously a Hiss defender, had not yet written Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case, showing to the satisfaction of almost everyone in the history community how right Chambers was about Hiss and the Communist infiltration of the government.

When it comes to the question of the principles involved, there is no better authority than Kazan himself.  Here, in the full text of an advertisement he purchased in The New York Times on April 12, 1952:   

In the past weeks intolerable rumors about my political position have been circulating in New York and Hollywood. I want to make my stand clear:
I believe that Communist activities confront the people of this country with an unprecedented and exceptionally tough problem. That is, how to protect ourselves from a dangerous and alien conspiracy and still keep the free, open, healthy way of life that gives us self-respect.

I expect to continue to make the same kinds of pictures and to direct the same kinds of plays.”

For anyone who might still believe that Kazan’s attackers hold the moral high ground, I suggest that they just go back and read his statement again, perhaps a little more carefully the second time through.  Who can honestly take issue with a single line in it?  If that doesn’t work, then watch this powerful scene in the Kazan-directed On the Waterfront.  It is hardly noble or admirable, Kazan is telling us, to protect the secrets of murderous, power-lusting thugs in the name of loyalty to one’s associates.  And when it comes to murderousness and power lust, the mobsters who controlled the New York docks in the movie were very small timers compared to the controllers of those he informed on for HUAC.  As he wrote in his autobiography, “On the Waterfront was my own story.  Every day I worked on that film, I was telling the world where I stood and my critics to go **** themselves.” (Elia Kazan: A Life, p. 529; quoted in Billingsley, p. 244).

AGITPROP

“Of all the arts, the cinema is the most important,” -Vladimir Lenin

 Consonant with that dictum, burrowing into Hollywood and taking it over was as important to Stalin’s Communist Party as controlling the docks was to the mob in On the Waterfront.  And it was very successful.  Contrary to the popular notion we might have now that one was taking great risks for his ideals to be a Communist, at the height of the party’s influence, it was actually a career advantage in Hollywood:

For the cinema revolutionaries, wrote Eugene Lyons, Communism was “an intoxicated state of mind, a glow of inner virtue, and a sort of comradeship in super-charity,” a way for the wealthy to posture as proletarian wage slaves. 

On the other hand, the Party triumphalist mind-set, the notion that they automatically write better screenplays and belonged to the victorious army of the future, led some to use ideology as a substitute for talent or even effort. 

According to Louis Berg, longtime Hollywood journalist Max Youngstein of Universal circulated a memo informing all personnel that being a Communist was no longer sufficient reason to be employed there, and that doing a bit of work would also be required.

Former Communist screenwriter Roy Huggins says that there were a number of “awful writers” who wouldn’t have worked without their politics.  For this type of person, Huggins said, becoming a member of the Communist Party “was just another way of being Sammy Glick,” the hero of Budd Schulberg’s novel, What Makes Sammy Run? (Billingsley, pp. 58-59) …

As for “the industry,” it was not up to admitting that it had played the role of what Lenin called “useful idiots,” duped and bilked by militant Communists.  Though it was the industry, not the government, that blacklisted writers and performers, the blacklist legend allowed the studios to pose as victims themselves, a cover-up too intoxicating to pass up. (Billingsley, pp. 272-273)

Had the movie moguls been really sincere in their newfound anti-Communism we would have seen them producing at least an occasional movie that reveals the truth about the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin and afterward.  More than half a century has passed and we have not yet seen anything out of Hollywood that might counteract the impression they left with 1940s movies like Mission to Moscow, Song of Russia, and The North Star. 

That has certainly not been for lack of good potential dramatic material.  Solzhenitsyn alone, we know, has stories galore, but there have been lots of others like Eugenia Ginzburg’s Journey into the Whirlwind or the sad stories of Americans in the Soviet Union like Thomas Sgovio, Victor Herman,* or Robert Robinson, whom we mention in our recent review of The Forsaken.  While Hollywood never seems to tire of movies that vilify the Nazis and, more recently, the Arabs and the Muslims, it is yet to produce anything about the Soviet bloc that begins to compare to the French movie, Est-Ouest (East-West), or the German movie, Das Leben der Anderen (The Lives of Others).

Rather, Hollywood still seems to prefer to romanticize Communism with movies like The Way We Were and Reds and to save its greatest opprobrium for those who called attention to the Communist subversion and infiltration problem.  The most recent example of the latter that comes to mind is George Clooney’s Good Night and Good Luck.

This negative focus upon the Hollywood blacklist in the one instance and upon Senator Joe McCarthy in the other suggests that what we are seeing in action here in both cases is nothing less than the Thirteenth of the Seventeen Techniques for Truth Suppression.  Our opinion molders have successfully changed the subject by creating a distraction.  So now, just as the story of Hollywood subversion by Communists begins with HUAC, the story that M. Stanton Evans and Herbert Romerstein recount with their new book Stalin’s Secret Agents: The Subversion of Roosevelt’s Government, as far as the dominant creators of national opinion are concerned, begins with Senator McCarthy’s presumed overly vigorous inquiries into that highly successful subversion.

There is ample reason to feel a sense of indignation at this whole sorry episode of American history.  If it must be directed at one particular American, it should be at the person responsible for consciously allowing Stalin’s subversion to go as far as it did.  Our previous writings have amply demonstrated who that person is.  His profile can be found on the dime, and he is currently being worship fully portrayed by Asner in a one-man show. [FDR]
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