Communists Have Controlled American Discourse Since 1930's

(Left, John Dos Passos left, and Hemmingway, center, in Spain)

During the Spanish Civil War, novelist John Dos Passos realized that Communism is a Jewish scam to gain totalitarian control. 

His friend Ernest Hemingway shot back: “Civil liberties, shit. Are you with us or against us?”  

Then, getting no reply, he lifted a clenched fist to the other’s face: 

“You [quit] and you will be finished, destroyed. The reviewers in New York will absolutely crucify you. These people know how to turn you into a back number. I’ve seen them do it. What they did once they can do again.”

The Red Decade Redux

by Harry Stein

(excerpt by henrymakow.com)

The case of Dos Passos is especially telling. In 1936, as a man of the Left, he was among America’s leading novelists–arguably Hemingway’s closest rival, having just published the third volume of his USA trilogy to wide acclaim, including a cover story in Time. It was thus understandable that he was among those recruited, along with Hemingway, to travel to Spain to make a film in support of the Republican cause. 

However, while there, Dos Passos began making inquiries about a close Spanish friend who’d unaccountably vanished, and eventually learned that Stalin’s secret police had murdered him. Belatedly, his eyes were opened to the bloodcurdling reality behind the myths so artfully propagated at home. Worse, he refused to stay quiet about it.

Lyons recounts the episode only briefly, making the point that, as a result, when the celebrated author’s next book was published three years later, critics discovered “that Dos Passos had never really known how to write.” 

The story was told in greater depth by historian Stephen Koch in his book The Breaking Point. With access to Dos Passos’s unpublished notes, he includes a chilling account of Hemingway’s last meeting with his onetime friend. Dos Passos plaintively asked, “What’s the use of fighting a war for civil liberties, if you destroy civil liberties in the process?” 

Hemingway shot back: “Civil liberties, shit. Are you with us or against us?” Then, getting no reply, he lifted a clenched fist to the other’s face: “You do that and you will be finished, destroyed. The reviewers in New York will absolutely crucify you. These people know how to turn you into a back number. I’ve seen them do it. What they did once they can do again.”

MORRIE RYSKIND

Another figure who makes a brief appearance in The Red Decade is screenwriter Morrie Ryskind, and his example speaks to the influence that his leftist foes would continue to wield years after The Red Decade‘s publication–even during the blacklist years of the late 1940s and early 1950s. 

One of the industry’s most successful writers, he had numerous credits, running from the Marx Brothers’ Animal Crackers and A Night at the Opera to My Man Godfrey and Stage Door. Ryskind broke ranks in 1947 by testifying in open session about Communist influence in the film industry. 

“In the twelve years prior to my testimony,” he’d write in his memoir, I Shot an Elephant in My Pajamas, “I was consistently one of the ten highest-paid writers in Hollywood. I turned down, on the average, at least three assignments for everyone I accepted, and I feel safe in saying I was welcome at every studio in town. After I testified against The Hollywood Ten, I was never again to receive one single offer from any studio.”

Few today, and fewer still in Hollywood will summon up much sympathy for those like Ryskind. In the contemporary view, as expressed in books, movies, and PBS documentaries beyond counting, outspoken anti-Communists of that era were the equivalent of Salem’s fanatics, paranoids fixated on a nonexistent international Communist conspiracy, while those who refused to cooperate (and paid with their livelihoods) were heroic martyrs to free speech and free thought. 

Morally complex as that moment was, there were those on each side who fit these characterizations, and, of course, there’s no question that the anti-Communist crusade swept up a great many more of Lyons’s credulous Innocents than actual or even potential subversives. Yet it’s also true that there were at least a handful who’d long since dispelled all doubt that their overriding loyalty was to the Stalinist state and, in some cases, had proved their ruthlessness in advancing its aims. And one can only shudder at what might have happened had their ilk achieved political power equal to their cultural influence.

COMMUNISM REJECTED, THEN EMBRACED

History didn’t play out that way. To the contrary: the fall from public grace of that era’s radical activists was so steep that for those growing up in the postwar years, the very word Communism was all but synonymous with barbarism and the crushing of the human spirit. For all Americans’ internecine quarrels over that time and the doubts sown by Vietnam and Watergate, for five decades few questioned who were fundamentally the good guys and who were the bad, in the grand scheme. As late as 1989, in the jubilation following the fall of the Berlin Wall, it would have been hard even on American college campuses to find many who didn’t believe that a profound evil had been defeated.

That’s no longer the case today. From the Soviet gulags and the brutal crackdowns in Hungary and Czechoslovakia to children turning on parents during the Cultural Revolution and the Cambodian genocide, much that was once common knowledge seems to have been forgotten or gone unlearned. How many schools still make Orwell required reading? How many college history majors have even heard of the masterwork of his fellow prophet, Arthur Koestler, author of Darkness at Noon?

In today’s Hollywood, where the 1950s blacklist stands as the great modern cautionary tale of the human capacity for evil, those with less than exemplary progressive politics routinely feel impelled to hide the fact from even close friends, and one can only guess at the grim fun Lyons would have with Tinseltown’s ever-changing victim power ratings. Whose heroic struggle for justice constitute the hottest properties this week: women, African-Americans, gays, transgenders? Never mind that their box-office appeal is likely to extend no more than five miles beyond the studio gates.