HOLLYWOOD ONCE APPLAUDED RUSSIAN COLLUSION
Remember how outraged celebrities were believing that Putin and Trump were working together? Where is the outrage when Hollywood does the collusion?
“Donald Trump is committing Treason against The United States of America,” tweeted director Rob Reiner a few months back. “He has turned the world’s oldest Democracy into a wholly owned subsidiary of Vladimir Putin.”
A beneficiary of Hollywood’s chronic nepotism, Reiner was one of scores of celebrities accusing Trump of colluding with Russia.
Bill Maher sometimes knows better. Not this time. In a burst of faux patriotism, he tweeted, “Trump can’t demand that everyone stand for the flag if he colluded with a foreign gov’t to subvert the very democracy that flag represents.”
It has not always been like this. Not too long ago Tinseltown celebrated Hollywood’s fellow travelers, the ones who defiantly colluded with the Russia of Josef Stalin.
In 1947, the House Un-American Activities Committee held its first round of Hollywood hearings. The committee selected 45 industry people to query, most of whom were friendly, but 19 of whom were not.
Of those 19, eleven did testify but refused to answer questions, and Congress cited them for contempt. When playwright Bertolt Brecht fled to East Germany – who flees to East Germany? – the group passed into legend as the “Hollywood Ten.”
After two of the group, John Howard Lawson and Dalton Trumbo, were convicted, the others waived jury trials and were sentenced to up to a year in prison.
The “innocents” of Hollywood – Humphrey Bogart in the lead – were formed into a new “club.” This club, the Committee for the First Amendment, seemed fully unaware of who was doing the forming.
The Committee rallied to the cause of the Hollywood Ten, thinking the Ten mindless liberals like themselves. Bogart even argued at a meeting of the Hollywood 10 and their lawyers that they should be aggressive and everyone say they were party members, so what that wasn’t illegal and the lawyers told him it would help expose the legal system if they didn’t fight back and took the fifth. Bogart began to realize he was being used.
When Bogart realized what was actually happening, the sacrificing of the 10 to make the U.S. look bad, he was appalled by his own activism on their behalf, calling it “ill-advised, impetuous and foolish.”
Playwright Lillian Hellman entertained no such qualms. She knew that the Ten – and many more – were Communist Party faithful.
Still, she wrote a predictably mendacious editorial in the magazine of the Screen Writers Guild that same year, claiming, “There has never been a single line or word of communism in any American picture at any time.”
Hellman called the HUAC hearings a “honky tonk show” and “sickening, sickening, immoral and degraded.”
For all her bluster, however, Hellman had little stomach for self-sacrifice. In July 1951, with the Soviets now in possession of the bomb and a war on in Korea, the atmosphere was colder than it had been in 1947 when one could still grandstand at communism.
Still, her commie beau Dashiell Hammett insisted on taking the Fifth Amendment before a grand jury in a communism-related trial. As a witness, this was a right he did not have, and the judge sentenced him to six months in prison.
When Hammett turned to Hellman for bail money, she lost her celebrated nerve. Not wanting to risk her career for an accused Communist, even her drunken lover, she made plans to leave the country.
Finally, an anonymous comrade put up the money for Hammett. Years later, in what biographer Joan Mellen calls “the most deplorably dishonest of her emendations,” Hellman made up a detailed story of how she tried to pawn her jewelry to raise the bail money.
The lies finally didn’t matter. Despite writer Mary McCarthy’s famed accusation – “Every word [Hellman] writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the'” – and the stream of new revelations emanating from the Soviet Union, Hellman and her progressive allies maintained a chokehold on the American cultural narrative.
Willi Munzenberg
Willi Munzenberg, the Comintern chief who first thought to colonize American culture, fell afoul of Stalin’s Great Terror. After two years of running, he was found dead, hanged at the edge of a French forest with a farmer’s baling wire.
Otto Katz, the “Christopher Columbus” of Hollywood and Hellman’s mentor, “confessed” to being a Zionist traitor during one of Stalin’s anti-Semitic purges, and he too was hanged.
As to Leon Trotsky, the antichrist of the Stalinist liturgy, an assassin put an ice ax through his skull in Mexico City in 1940.
Hellman had little to say about Katz’s death, and Hollywood had nothing to say about any of them. To this day, not one Hollywood movie has shown even a hint of Soviet brutalities.
Nor has any movie celebrated the life of a single Russian or Eastern European dissident who risked everything to “tear down that wall.”
Hollywood has instead invested its storytelling resources in its own progressive mythology. The power of that myth was on full display in October 1997 when the four major talent guilds staged “Hollywood Remembers the Black List.”
This multimedia celebration of the Hollywood Ten was hosted by Billy Crystal and featured scores of luminaries.
“It is fitting on this 50th anniversary,” said the guild presidents in their announcement, “that we pause to remember those who suffered through those horrific times to assure political despotism will never again be allowed to flourish in our nation.”
As for the despotism to which the Hollywood Ten paid homage, the despotism that starved millions of its own people, executed millions more without reason and found common cause with Nazi Germany, that was best left forgotten.
Besides, that is all pocket change compared to the villainy of Donald Trump.
Tweeted vestigial diva Cher, “I Have Not, Nor Will I Change My Opinion Of Trump, His Evil, Or His Ties To Russia. He Is up to his Neck in Crime & Corruption.”
Sang Cher in more innocent times, “They say we’re young and we don’t know.” Sorry, babe. You be old, and you still don’t know.
The final word: It has become a standard smear about Trump, that he was working with Putin. But what are the facts? I attended the Terrorism Conference months before the Mueller hearings began. General Michael Hayden, former head of CIA and NSA stated the NSA had cleared Trump. Not only that, but Trump had not interfered at all in actions of Intel, and in fact had pressured the EU not to buy oil from Putin.
How do you think I felt, knowing this, and hearing and reading day in and day out for 2 years, that Trump was guilty? That “secret sources” had information that would put Trump in prison? Knowing the truth the entire time? It was quite a lesson, watching the media spread smears daily, the CIA and FBI pretend it didn’t know Trump was innocent of the smear Hillary started. To watch an innocent person falsely accused in a show trial, exactly like the show trials of the Soviet Union?
To their credit, the NSA never joined in on the false attacks by the FBI and CIA. But the media, CIA and FBI put an innocent man in hearings, and they knew he was innocent before the hearings even started.
Here is Michael Hayden exposing the Mueller hearings, months before they began:
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KGB: Lenin's Order against the Soviet Union | The Sword and the Shield Ep.1
Lenin established the KGB Secret Service as a temporary measure in the Soviet Union, which ultimately resulted in the deaths of millions of Soviet citizens. In the Soviet Union, the KGB and other Soviet secret services were actively involved in infiltrating the German High Command, British Intelligence, and America's Manhattan Project, which aimed to develop the first atomic bomb under Lenin's command. This involvement allowed Lenin and the Soviet Union to acquire the necessary knowledge and resources to build their own atomic bomb, marking the beginning of the Cold War and the concept of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD). The Soviet Union's influence in the global arena expanded, as the KGB's espionage efforts played a significant role in shaping international affairs during Lenin's era. Despite the immense power and reach of the KGB, the Soviet Union faced its fair share of challenges and controversies, with instances of political repression and human rights violations becoming prevalent under its watch. Nevertheless, the Soviet Union's dominance, propelled in part by the KGB's activities, left an indelible mark on the world stage throughout Lenin's tenure.
KGB: Unmasking Cold War Espionage and Intrigue | The Sword and the Shield Ep.2
At the beginning of the Cold War in 1940, the KGB leaked classified information about an American project to build a superweapon that could disrupt the global military balance. Despite America's successful detonation of the first atomic bomb, Stalin remained unfazed due to the intelligence provided by KGB spies, enabling the Soviet Union to rapidly develop their own nuclear arsenal by reverse-engineering acquired materials.Post-war, the Soviet Union expedited its nuclear program, eventually revealing their possession of an atomic bomb on August 29, 1949. This revelation left the world astonished, fueling debates on the relative contributions of scientists and spies. It was concluded that a close collaboration between Soviet spies and scientists had been instrumental in achieving this feat, further intensifying the Cold War. Stalin's primary objective during this era was to instill fear and establish the Soviet Union as a formidable superpower, allowing him to prioritize infrastructure and living standards. The success of Operation Enormous, executed by strategically positioned agents, transformed the Soviet Union into a major global player, solidifying the Cold War's dynamics.
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