Monday, July 31, 2006
REDS
One of the things my wife and I share is a deep and broad cinephilia -- we love movies, watch a lot of them and both have a lot of knowledge of the trivia of the movie business and culture of the classic age up through the early 1960s. But one part of the "culture wars" that never fails to cause a stir in our house is Hollywood's romantic attachment to its self-appointed role as hero in the "Red Scare" of the 1950s. Even the term -- "Red Scare" -- is a carefully crafted slant, to tilt the discussion in favor of the left, implying as it does that those who were concerned about communist subversion in the 1950s were cruel paranoids.
Although many of the younger generation of the left probably don't even know it, two of the defining landmarks of the historical landscape that gave birth to the contemporary American left were the espionage trials of Alger Hiss and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were accused of being Soviet spies. Good people in the 1950s supported Hiss and the Rosenbergs and bad people (like Richard Nixon, who prosecuted Hiss, and Joe McCarthy, who made people see "reds under the bed") attacked them -- that was the simple, black-and-white moral equation that became a straight-forward litmus test for ideology and culture. After McCarthy's public fall, this moral equation became dogma on the left, and the shame of McCarthy's methods was a cudgel used by the left and wielded by Hollywood to enforce leftist hegemony in America's popular culture. How many films have celebrated the heroes of the "Hollywood Blacklist"? They are still being made today -- we watched George Clooney's Good Night and Good Luck just recently, a film that faithfully and skillfully recites the heroic catechism once more.
But, with the fall of the Soviet Union and years of painstaking scholarship, we now know that one of the fundamental elements of this leftist dogma is dead wrong: Hiss and the Rosenbergs were guilty -- they were Soviet spies.
What does it mean? Well, one thing it means is that the world just isn't as simple as our popular culture teaches. But it also teaches that things like archetypical morality plays aren't subject to facts or reason. The myth of the Red Scare and the Blacklist will never die -- regardless of the facts.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 7:55 AM
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