The Actors and The Communists

I've written two posts, The Actor and The Mullahs, and The Actor and The Mullahs-Redux

There is a long tradition of Western intellectuals going abroad to sing the praises of revolutionaries in distant lands and finding in them the realization of their own intellectual hopes.

Hollywood has an history of supporting non democratic regimes - one need only to look back about 60 years ago, where many in the Hollywood community were card carrying communists who believed in the goodness of the Soviet Union.

Even the revelation of Stalin's crime elicited such ludicrous justification about how great it was the Soviet Union would admit the horrendous things they perpetuated.

Robert Fulford penned "Hollywood's False Martyrs" for the National Post in October in which he posits this question "Why did the Hollywood 300 become secret communists in the first place, and why did they later allow themselves to be manipulated by the party for the sake of anti-American propaganda?"

The answer may surprise you. 60 years later, things haven't changed all that much.

Do the Hollywood communists still matter, more than half a century after they faced HUAC? Absolutely. To this minute, their rewritten story distorts cultural history and colours the self-image of Hollywood leftists, making even the dullest among them feel like brave radicals and potential martyrs.