Hollywood loves dictators
newsandopinion.com |Laura Ingraham
In Hollywood films, the bad guys usually lose. They aren't celebrated. They aren't deified.
The good guys don't engage in endless "dialogue" as innocents are killed and tortured. The
heroes are the ones who fight hard and triumph over evil. Hollywood just doesn't make
films exalting leaders who torture or kill their own citizens.
At least it didn't until Oliver Stone spent some time in Cuba, hanging with Fidel.
Coming this May on HBO, is Stone's documentary "Commandante," about the life of Fidel
Castro. Jake Tapper of Salon.com reported on Stone's softball session with reporters
recently at the Sundance Film Festival. "I thought he was warm and bright," said Stone of
his amigo nuevo Castro, "He's a very driven man, a very moral man. He's very concerned
about his country. He's selfless in that way."
Yet does Stone, for a moment, ever think about what would happen to a Cuban filmmaker
who tried to produce a glowing film about President Bush? Does he think about Castro's
jails teeming with prisoners whose crime was not thinking properly? Of course not. That
would divert energy from a more important task-savaging American foreign policy.
It's easy to write off much of what comes out of the mouths of Hollywood leftists. They
repay the country that made their wealth and privilege possible by trashing her traditions
and institutions. They side with countries that resent us, and trust dictators like Saddam or
Fidel more than the American voters or the President they elected.
The school-girl crushes that so many among our cultural elite have on dictators is nothing
new. Stalin was a favorite of many New York intellectuals in the '20s. Jane Fonda cuddled
up to Ho Chi Mihn. American liberals pushing unilateral disarmament 25 years ago thought
the Soviet Union's didn't have the intentions of an "evil empire," but worried about what
Reagan might do. Now these same people are taking field-trips to Baghdad and Havana so
that they may come home and educate us.
Hollywood's more vocal anti-war crusaders--Susan Sarandon, Martin Sheen, Sean Penn,
George Clooney, Sheryl Crow, Madonna and Dave Matthews--want America to know
that they are concerned for "the children." But what about the children of Iraqi dissidents
who are routinely flogged and beheaded by Sadam's secret police? These same celebrities
rally around slogans such as "girl power." Yet Iraq's women are treated like property, not
partners. These celebrities are for gay rights. But gay pride in Iraq is punishable by death.
These stars say they're for the environment. But a retreating Saddam set fire to the Kuwaiti
oil wells at the end of the Gulf War.
All that, of course, is America's fault.
Being hopelessly liberal and out of touch with the rest of the country isn't anything new for
the entertainment industry, but this new strain of anti-Americanism is. Essentially, they
believe that in our "interdependent world," America should start acting, well, less American.
We should stop playing the "superpower" role. (Leave that to Tobey McGuire or Keanu
Reeves.) We should start taking on "more mature" roles, and model ourselves after the
sensible countries in Europe.
Stone's deification of Castro is especially sickening, even by his standards. Yet so far
Hollywood is silent on Stone's glossing over decades of Castro's bloody repression.
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