Who are the Villains?
I hate to be a Hollywood belittler,
And yet, you ever notice how
The stock bad guy in films is always Hitler,
And never Stalin, Lenin, or Mao?
Guilty as Charged
—“Look at the forensic astrology for the event…
Basically states that he did it…& drugged her”
—social media discussion thread on the Lindsay Clancy trial
The grossest kind of psychosis
Grows online by osmosis,
As “therapeutic” SSRIs
Burn ever brighter in our eyes.
Adam Wasem is a writer and rare bookseller living in suburban Salt Lake City, Utah.
Good final lines for both, Adam. Looking up “movies against Mao” results in mostly the opposite. And your “Burns ever brighter in our eyes” is brilliant indeed, considering the percentage of persons taking drugs promising a temporarily brighter view of life.
Isn’t it wild how it’s always “Hitler Hitler Hitler,” but never, “Hey, maybe the gulags weren’t such a great idea.” I’ve always thought it must be the siren song of something for nothing. “You get all the rich guy’s shit for free” is a lot more appealing to the shiftless and lazy than “Kampfen fur deine Volk.”
I went back and forth between “ever brighter” and “ever blacker,” both in light of the chilling courtroom scenes of Clancy’s stone-faced staring down of the jury, and the connotations and juxtapositions of the image. I’ll probably go with “ever blacker” in the future.
Well done on that first poem especially, Adam.
The Nazi concentration camps were based on the Soviet gulags.
The Nazis were literally National Socialists.
The Nazis worked hand in glove with the Russian Soviets to attack Poland.
In the main stream consciousness, the real history of the last 100 years has not been told. Communism has been the real enemy of humanity (its ideology hijacking German nationalism) and continues to be through the Chinese Communist Party.
This is a good book on the topic: https://www.thespecterofcommunism.com/en/preface/
Evan, I’m glad you recommend this book–and Adam, glad you wrote the poem leading Evan to mention it. From the English preface to THE SPECTER OF COMMUNISM (available at Evan’s link), I see its perspective (although much broader in dealing with the global struggle) is very much in sympathy with THE CRISTERO COUNTERREVOLUTION, newly available in English. The author of that book on the 1926 to 1929 civil war against communism in Mexico, points out that the real history is only beginning to be told, now 100 years after the events, because until now sources and archives from the time period have been largely unavailable.
Clearly, Democratic Socialism in the form of the DSA is the most pressing threat to America today. And clearly the Hollywood fellow travelers aren’t going to be any help. As usual, it’s up to the poets. Perhaps my little jeu will spark a great conflagration of awareness. Dare to dream.
Stalin and Lenin get off easy in Hollywood, probably because so many left-wingers work there, but it works because our fathers and grandfathers didn’t enlist to fight Stalin.
Are there movies about the badness of Bin Laden and the goodness of the young men who enlisted to fight him, yet? I don’t pay enough attention to know…
Great write Adam, BRAVO .. by the way I am sure you have often wondered HOW and WHY wars are still predominant in the 21 st century.. Evan Mantyk’s comments are relevant, could it also be power politics out of Brussels like the NWO agenda 2021 delayed to 2030 following the World Trade Center debacle?
here is an extract from my “were u there?” Nam 65
Fear of death imposed upon the troops, not upon the warmonger’s campaign groups. Leftover funds for survivors equally, wartime politics with a Master’s degree.
Have a nice day. Keep up your inspiring writes.
There have been some strongly anti-communist films, but certainly nowhere near the number of films which use Hitler and the Nazis as stock villains. The problem is that the upper apparatus of Hollywood bigshots (with rare exceptions) have been left-liberals in both convictions and sympathies. When producers, directors, screenplay writers, film reviewers, and publicity agents are overwhelmingly fellow travelers and parlor pinks, they are going to make the kinds of films that they like.
I once tried to compile a list of all the well-known film actors and actresses who were strongly conservative or right-wing. The list was longer than you might have suspected: Charlton Heston, John Wayne, Ronald Reagan, Adolphe Menjou, Loretta Young, Richard Boone, Clint Eastwood, Ida Lupino, Richard Egan, and many other lesser lights. But those who act are employees, and paid to play in whatever roles or scenarios they are hired for.
As for those online weirdos who claim that Patrick Clancy framed his wife and was the actual murderer — well, even the most extreme left-liberals and feminists are trying to step back and away from those fever-swamp freaks. Plan B for them right now is to savagely attack and demean the lone black juror, and aim for a “Double Jeopardy” dismissal based on legal technicalities (“He didn’t fill out his juror questionnaire properly!”)
All of this has been carefully planned, and I’m sure that Hollywood is already thinking of a tear-jerker movie glorifying Lindsay Clancy as “a tortured but loving mother.”
Yeah, nowadays right wingers (and even right-leaning types) in Hollywood either don’t get work, like James Woods, or they have to fund and produce their own films, like Mel Gibson. I do wonder what the Hollywood parlor pinkos, in your phrase, think they’re going to be doing after the revolution. They don’t seem to understand that only a tiny minority of them will be selected to make regime propaganda; the vast majority, if not outright executed, are going to be laboring in the salt mines towards the next five-year plan.
Re: the extreme left moderating, I suppose it’s good that they’re still mindful of optics, but that their “moderate” position is to dox and demean the lone holdout juror, simply because he declined to acquit a woman who confessed to the systematic, cold-blooded murder of all 3 of her children, pretty much says it all about where the left is.
Adam, your “Villains” makes a point I learned in 1973 reading The Gulag Archipelago of A. I. Solzhenitsyn. He made a credible argument that Lenin and Stalin caused the deaths of more than 33 million Russians during their tenures, including Stalin’s near decimation of his home country Georgia. That’s more than four times the Nazis’ reported tally. Since the Soviet Union was our “ally” in WWII, and Germany was our enemy. no-one seems inclined to discuss that, or the US contribution to it in Operation Keelhaul at the end of WWII. I take this as “history being the winner’s version of what happened,” attributed to Winston Churchill.
There isn’t nearly enough appreciation of The Gulag Archipelago in the West. Operation Keelhaul isn’t surprising, though, given the extent of Communist infiltration in Roosevelt’s administration.
I have never read of communist infiltration of FDR’s administration; can you provide references I can read? I would be most interested in that. Thank you.
I have read in multiple sources years ago that Stalin outmaneuvered a frail FDR, and Churchill just sat idly by and let it happen, at the Yalta conference to get US agreement to Operation Keelhaul.
BTW, how’s the weather in SLC? I have much family there but have lost touch with them. I treasure the time I had there.
The Communist infiltration of the FDR administration was very deep and very intense. If you want the most authoritative book on the matter, read “Witness” by Whittaker Chambers. He names plenty of names. A very high figure in the Roosevelt administration was Alger Hiss, who was a Soviet agent. He, his wife Priscilla, and his brother Donald sent an endless flood of top-secret documents directly to Stalin and the Communist intelligence service in Russia. The Roosevelt government was honeycombed with Communist traitors.
Thank you Joseph, I appreciate the reference.
As Joseph said, refer to “Witness” if you want to understand the depth of Communist infiltration in Roosevelt’s cabinet. You won’t get it in mainstream sources because they are all leftist (Communist) captured. Basically, Joseph McCarthy was right.
And the weather in SLC is beautiful, now that it’s September, and the high summer heat is modulating. Mormons, as you no doubt know, are wary of interacting with polite decliners of their missionaries, and are inordinately spooked when ambushed by offers of convivial cocktails, but are otherwise pleasant, orderly and inoffensive neighbors. There are worse ways to wait for the end of the American Imperium than watching the sunset paint the Wasatch front, in peace and quiet, evening after evening.
Thank you, Adam, I shall read Witness; and thank you for the images of SLC. I have fond memories there and of Provo and Spanish Fork as well.