Red Star Over Hollywood

WHO: Ronald and Allis Radosh, authors of the new book Red Star over
Hollywood.

WHAT: The Film Colony's Long Romance with Red Left, which details the
behind-the-scenes radicalism of many members of the Communist Party in
Hollywood.

WHEN: Thursday, May 26, 9:00PM CDT

WHE WGN Radio AM 720kHz - listen live
http://wgnradio.com/listen/index.htm

WHY: The Post-Modern or "Leftover" Left (AKA - David the Red Menace)

Early in 2003, the Left, with their useful idiot supporters in Hollywood and
anti-American (i.e. anti-capitalist) forces around the world, committed
themselves to protecting the neo-Nazi dictator of Iraq, Saddam Hussein. This
tyrant, who recently engineered his "reelection" with 99% of the vote, has
conducted a terror regime for more than twenty years, with constant torture,
the use poison gas against Kurds and others, invasions of Iran and Kuwait,
and defiance for 12 years against international sanctions requiring him to
account for and destroy the stocks of chemical and biological agents that he
admitted to possessing. This person was then elevated by the Left into the
leader of the heroic struggle of the Iraqi people against America. Thus, one
of the most violent and vicious rulers in the world, whose son reportedly
regularly kidnaps, rapes, and murders women, becomes the "progressive"
poster child for "peace." The most cutting retort to this seems to be that
the United States supported Saddam Hussein against Iran. Well, the United
States supported Josef Stalin against Hitler, and I don't hear any
complaints about that, even though Stalin ended up murdering more people,
and certainly enslaving more for longer, that Hitler did. But then Stalin
was a good guy to these people, and we were bad for later opposing him.
....
The "peace" movement, therefore, like the "peace" movement in the Vietnam
era, is not really for peace, it is for the defeat of America, by Communists
if possible, but by anyone (like Hussein) if necessary. If Saddam Hussein
has biological, chemical, or nuclear weapons, and if these can be put into
the hands of terrorists, to kill thousands (more) or millions of Americans
(and Jews), that is the consummation devoutly to be desired. The fools, who
didn't mind when Bill Clinton overthrew the government of Haiti or bombed
the hell out of Serbia, now naively marched with people whose fondest hope
was that Saddam Hussein would survive and be able to kill us.

The United States, however, overthrew Hussein and occupied Iraq in three
weeks. A country that has never had a liberal society or a democratic
government, and is vulnerable to the attractions of Islâmic Fascism, is a
poor candidate for "nation building." The American experience in Iraq
therefore may very well turn out no better than it was in Lebanon in the
80's or Somalia in the 90's; but any day such a dictator can be overthrown
is a good day for humanity. This is what the Left can never admit, if such
an event is ever of any benefit to the United States itself.
....
http://www.friesian.com/rand.htm#essential and scroll down.

Also read - The Black Book of Communism, published in 1997.

François Furet, author and former Communist, argues that Stalin was able to
mask the terror of the Soviet state, and indeed to widen its appeal to many
in the West, by assuming the mantle of anti fascism.

For decades, the legions of Stalin’s followers were able to depict
themselves as fellow partisans in the good fight. Moreover, they were also
able to deflect attention from the crimes committed by Stalin and his
henchmen, especially since anyone who told the truth about what was taking
place in the USSR was immediately branded a Fascist. Thus we had the strange
spectacle of the French left erupting in anger after publication of Courtois
’ book, which they claimed (in a throwback to the days of the Popular Front)
was a new apologia for fascism. Even today, it seems, critics of communism
face stern resistance in the West.

Many liberals are reluctant to attack Communists unreservedly out of a fear
that doing so would "play into the hands of the right." Anticommunism, in
this view, is but a variant of antiliberalism, and it tends, moreover, to
legitimate reactionary regimes and movements. To many well–meaning Western
liberals, therefore, it is more important to ignore or minimize the crimes
of communism—they are in the past, after all—than to do anything that would
aid the primary enemy on the right. In the extreme version of this position,
as Malia notes, "a moral man can have ‘no enemies to the left.’" From this
perspective, it matters not that Communists and Fascists committed
comparable crimes; what counts is that their "moral auras were
antithetical." Malia responds to this view by citing the argument of East
European dissidents that "mass murder in the name of a noble idea is more
perverse than it is in the name of a base one."

http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/...ws/radosh.html

Already famous throughout Europe, this international bestseller plumbs
recently opened archives in the former Soviet bloc to reveal the actual,
practical accomplishments of Communism around the world: terror, torture,
famine, mass deportations, and massacres. Astonishing in the sheer detail it
amasses, the book is the first comprehensive attempt to catalogue and
analyze the crimes of Communism over seventy years.

"Revolutions, like trees, must be judged by their fruit," Ignazio Silone
wrote, and this is the standard the authors apply to the Communist
experience--in the China of "the Great Helmsman," Kim Il Sung's Korea,
Vietnam under "Uncle Ho" and Cuba under Castro, Ethiopia under Mengistu,
Angola under Neto, and Afghanistan under Najibullah. The authors, all
distinguished scholars based in Europe, document Communist crimes against
humanity, but also crimes against national and universal culture, from
Stalin's destruction of hundreds of churches in Moscow to Ceausescu's
leveling of the historic heart of Bucharest to the widescale devastation
visited on Chinese culture by Mao's Red Guards.

As the death toll mounts--as many as 25 million in the former Soviet Union,
65 million in China, 1.7 million in Cambodia, and on and on--the authors
systematically show how and why, wherever the millenarian ideology of
Communism was established, it quickly led to crime, terror, and repression.
An extraordinary accounting, this book amply documents the unparalleled
position and significance of Communism in the hierarchy of violence that is
the history of the twentieth century.

http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/COUBLA.html