ON KAZAN :
Kazan was a former Communist, who quit the party after he recognized that his handlers were taking their orders directly from Moscow, and was disgusted by their tactics and agenda.
The 8 people he named were members or had been members of the Communist party like him. Some of them had agreed to him naming them during his testimony.
Stalin belongs in the same category as Hitler for his crimes. He was a repugnant animal.
The Hollywood personalities that blame Kazan for his testimony are hypocrites, or uninformed , brainwashed, overpaid, stupid brats.
FYI, see the following article :
George Will: Honor Elia Kazan
Sacramento Bee
March 21, 1999 George Will
Honor Elia Kazan. . .
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Published March 21, 1999
WASHINGTON--At Sunday night's Academy Awards ceremony, Elia Kazan, the director, was honored for his professional achievements. The honor comes to him belatedly because of what his political beliefs impelled him to do in 1952.
The honor for him is disputed by some people who paid a price for their political beliefs and by others who sympathize with those people. Some protesters argue that he should be made to suffer a kind of continuing ostracism because of his beliefs, because he participated in an episode in which people suffered for their beliefs.
At the core of this controversy is the matter of intellectual responsibility. Is it invariably unjust when people pay a price for political advocacy? Should there be no penalty for protracted sympathy for obvious tyranny?
After the Second World War, some screenwriters and others who were or had been communists went to jail on contempt charges rather than name other communists for the House Un-American Activities Committee. Their careers were seriously injured when they were "blacklisted" by Hollywood studios.
HUAC had a high Yahoo quotient which made anti-communism seem declasse and generally disreputable to many moderate Americans. And the studios probably acted as much from commercial prudence as from honorable disgust. However, Hollywood's communists and fellow-travelers cannot derive virtue from the defects of their tormentors.
Kazan, who had briefly been a communist in the late 1930s, was asked by HUAC in 1952 to name persons he had known to be communists. He did and was denounced as an informer, a charge now resuscitated by those protesting tonight's honor.
Stephen Rosenfeld of The Washington Post rejects "unconditioned sympathy" for the blacklisted, whose views ranged "from the mistaken to the despicable." But he suggests "it is un-American to penalize a person for his (known or suspected) thoughts and words rather than for his criminal deeds."
Not necessarily. The law should not, but social sanctions sometimes should punish people who proclaim beliefs such as sympathy for Stalinism. In 1952, Stalinism meant the mass-murder machinery of the gulag, in the belly of which Alexander Solzhenitsyn suffered.
In 1947, historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and other liberal cold warriors founded Americans for Democratic Action, partly to inoculate liberalism against the virus of anti-anti-communism. Today Schlesinger asks: Would Kazan have been denounced if he had been a former member of the German-American Bund naming underground Nazis, or a former Klansman naming other Klansmen, or a former member of Nixon's White House staff informing on his boss?
Kazan's critics were not scandalized by John Dean's cooperation with a congressional committee. Informing per se was not Kazan's offense, Schlesinger says. "His true offense in the minds of the Hollywood protesters is that he informed on the Communist Party."
To which, Victor Navasky, editor of The Nation magazine, responds: Of course Kazan's detractors would not be upset if he had exposed Nazis, Klansmen or Mafiosi. "But these were anti-Semites, racists and lawbreakers, whereas the actors, writers and directors who joined the Communist Party (a legal party, by the way) in the '30s started out as social idealists who believed that the party was the best place to fight fascism abroad and racism at home."
But by 1938 the nature of Stalinism was patent in the show trials. In 1939, when Stalin became Hitler's ally, the Communist Party USA turned on a dime, endorsed the Nazi-Soviet carving up of Poland and soon was opposing aid to Finland in its struggle against Soviet aggression. By 1952, when Kazan testified, the lid of tyranny had been bolted down behind the Iron Curtain in central Europe, Berlin had been blockaded, Czechoslovakia captured by a coup, Korea invaded. And if anti-Semitism is what makes Navasky's blood boil, in 1952 Stalin's ferocity was directed at the Jewish doctors' "plot."
Those who sympathize with the Hollywood "victims" of anti-communism regard publicly articulated sympathy for Stalinism as less serious than a social faux pas like using the salad fork on the main course. But political words are deeds in the struggle to shape opinion and the Hollywood Stalinists' words were their participation in a war on the side of the enemy.
Some may say the Hollywood Stalinists should not be blamed, because Solzhenitsyn had not yet revealed the truth about the Soviet Union. But there already was ample evidence of the truth. And Solzhenitsyn's testimony was delayed by the jailer with whom Hollywood's supposed innocents found little fault.
When hearing from these "victims" and their sympathizers consider: If anyone in Hollywood had been for 15 minutes as sympathetic to Hitler as many of them were to Stalin for 15 years, that person would have instantly become a permanent pariah. |
