The Real Blacklist In Hollywood

Academy Award winning actor Jon Voight wrote a superb editorial for the Washington Times that *gasp* did not follow the Hollywood Party line. And there are a number of people who call for him to be blacklisted because of it, not to mention attacks on his character, intelligence and career. Here's some samples:

"You’d think an arch conservative working in an overwhelmingly liberal town would think about restraining himself for expediency’s sake, if nothing else. …

Honestly? If I were a producer and I had to make a casting decision about hiring Voight or some older actor who hadn’t pissed me off with an idiotic Washington Times op-ed piece, I might very well say to myself, “Voight? Let him eat cake."


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"As a young production executive at the studio, I was trying to push 'Love Story' forward and joined colleagues in trying to interest Voight in the part. However, the more we prodded, the more reluctant he became. He finally blurted: 'The character in this movie is a Harvard student. He's bright. He reads books. I could never be believable as that smart young guy.'

"Reading Voight's op-ed piece these many years later, I realize how right he was.”

These, of course are the first people to hiss out 'McCarthyism' when anyone even obliquely challenges their hard left views.

Even more interesting in a way was this bit, from Leftard Jeffrey Wells:

"It's been said in this town many times that the right has a debt to pay for the blacklisting of lefties in the '50s, and that in all fairness it's probably going to take a long time to make amends. The fact is that the philosophical grandfathers and great-grandfathers of today's right-wingers ruined the lives of many Hollywood screenwriters in the '50s, and so their descendants now have to suffer and make up for that."

I think the moral infantilism of this attitude is sufficiently obvious that I don't have to underline it here, but the idea of payback intrigues me.

One of the things I love to do whenever someone like this mentions McCarthyism is to look at them, smile and say politely: "You know, McCarthy was a drunk and something of a blowhard, but in essence, what exactly was he wrong about?"

And then sit back and watch the steam come out of their ears.

The fact is that whatever one might think of his personal style,McCarthy wasn't wrong. Thanks to a determined effort by the Soviets to penetrate the US and subvert our country Hollywood was riddled with Communist sympathizers who did the Soviet's bidding and actual Soviet agents, and so was the State Department and other areas of American life.

We know that because of the declassification of the secret Venona cables, a US intelligence project that broke the Soviet's cable code back before WWII and because, from the time of the fall of the Soviet Union until recently, we had full access to the Soviet archives.The names include Alger Hiss,Paul Robeson, Lillian Hellman, Harry Dexter White, Albert Maltz, reporter Walter Duranty, the Rosenbergs and a host of others. I recommend a reading of Ann Coulter's 'Treason', Mona Charen's 'Useful Idiots' and David Horowitz's 'Radical Son' for interested parties.

This was a deliberate Soviet strategy, by the way, first postulated by the Italian communist intellectual Antonio Gramsci, who's credited with the marxist idea of waging war on capitalist society by attacking its culture and institutions - its media,poitical parties, universities, legal system and even its arts. This is known today as gramscian warfare, and how throughly the Soviets penetrated America's institutions can be seen in Hollywood and on any university campus today.

Note that I'm not talking about people who were merely communists by conviction and were trying to bring about the Worker's Paradise by democratic means. Some of them were caught in HUAC's net, and some of them complied with the Smith Act and tried to help the US Government by being forthcoming about their former associates...or not, out of a misplaced spirit of solidarity, in which case they were likewise blacklisted. But in this case I'm actually talking about people who were consciously involved in subversion and espionage against their own country.

And if we're talking about payback, I want some for all the damage these people and in many cases their progeny, the so-called red diaper babies did to my beloved country and its institutions.

The sad part is that a great many of those descendants, both of communists by conviction and those whom aided and abetted the Soviets are still in power in Hollywood and enforce a political reign of terror - anyone who opens his mouth and doesn't walk in lockstep risks not being hired. That's what the quotes above freely acknowledge...the real Hollywood blacklist, and it's a lot more oppressive and permanent than the old one, unless someone is very well established.

All one needs to do is look at a fair amount of Hollywood's recent product, and more importantly, the type of films that aren't being made to understand that. Jon Voight merely spotlighted it for us once again.